[Expat-discuss] Bugs in expat 1.95.8 [WAS: Expat 1.95.8 fails on XML with newline]

[rolf at pointsman.de]

On 14 Dec, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Karl Waclawek <karl at waclawek.net> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
>> >Nevertheless its bad behaviour of expat and shall be fixed.
>> 
>> For saying this, the wrath of the XML gods will come upon you. ;-)
> I really dont care about such fundamentalists. 
> XML is a text format, and those normally have dozens over newlines. 
> I dont see where kindly accepting some additional newlines makes
> any trouble. Expat is per definition an non-validating parser and
> thus is not intendet for syntax checking. 

This is not about fundamentalism, but about playing under the
rules. For the current matter, the rules are very clear. There are
even a reason for that rule (to simplify a bit the process of
autodetection of the document encoding).

This is also no matter of validating versus non-validating parser. The
rule in discussion is valid also for non-validating parsers.

Sure, there is no absolute *must*, that the rules, especially this
one, are exactly the way, they are. (And I'm not very happy about
every decision of the xml wg.) I only say, that this mailing list is
the wrong place to discuss this. Write to w3c XML wg (good luck!).

rolf