[jdom-interest] Issue: When the DTD is not available

[Richard Monson-Haefel]

First: Congratulations to Brett McLaughlin, Jason Hunter and others on
the JDOM project for creating a an exceptional XML API.  It's very
impressive.

<disclaimer> I don't claim to have expertise in XML so the issue I'm
about to bring up may not be an issue at all. <disclaimer>

I noticed that I get exceptions from the build operations of both the
SAXBuilder and DOMBuilder if the DTD is not physically available when
parsing the XML document.  This is understandable if I set validate=true
when constructing a builder, but doesn't seem logical if I set
validate=false.

The exceptions are generated by the underlying parsers, so there may not
be a solution, but it would be nice -- when validate is set to false --
if you could allow a file to be parsed without requiring the presence of
the DTD.

The "problem" occurs under the following conditions:

The DTD is public at some Internet address but the file is not there.
The DTD is public at some Internet address but the machine is not
connected.
The DTD is a system file, but its not in the same directory as the VM.

Thanks,

Richard

--
Richard Monson-Haefel
Author of Enterprise JavaBeans, 2nd Edition  (O'Reilly 2000)
Co-Author of Java Message Service (O'Reilly 2000)
http://www.EjbNow.com