Bill de h�ra wrote:
Electric XML did not distinguish between ignorable whitespace (as defined in the XML specification, which requires validation) and ordinary whitespace separating elements - it just discarded it all. As I remember the only whitespace it reported was inside elements with only character data content.Dennis Sosnoski wrote:AFAIK XPP has always reported whitespace properly. Glue's Electric XML is the only parser I know of that discards whitespace between elements (though this may have become an option rather than hardwired behavior in recent versions).
Fair enough if a feature is provided that allows ignorable ws to be just that. But that doesn't answer my question.
Your argument is perhaps better directed at SOAP itself. Many XML advocates feel that SOAP is not XML and should stop representing itself as such. To quote from the 1.1 spec: "A SOAP message MUST NOT contain a Document Type Declaration. A SOAP message MUST NOT contain Processing Instructions." This means that SOAP uses a subset of XML, and XML subsets are not recognized.XPP3 is the current version of the XPP parser. XPP3 implements the XMLPull interface (http://www.xmlpull.org) and is compliant with the XML specification except with respect to DTDs and related issues (general entities, etc.). These generally aren't used for data-oriented XML, and I think they're actually forbidden by SOAP.
XPP hs no business calling itself an XML anything if it doesn't square with XML 1.0. If it wants to be a SOAP processor, it should be renamed.
If you want full XML support with an XMLPull parser you've got the option of using the implementation based on Xerces XNI (which I think includes full validation support), or could alternatively write a wrapper for the basic XMLPull interface that handles DTD processing. I've thought about doing that in the past, but it hasn't been high on my priority list.
IMHO one of the mistakes of the SAX interface design was to merge DTD handling and validation into the parser core. These types of functions can more cleanly be handled as layers over a core parser API. If this had been done with SAX we would have the problem of some parsers supporting validation and other not - the validation would be a SAX filter that could be used with any parser.
- Dennis
