[jdom-interest] Substituting a different <!DOCTYPE ...> when parsing an XML file

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

At 4:36 PM +0000 5/30/02, Geoff Rimmer wrote:
>When parsing XML files with validation switched on, I think that in
>95% of cases, it should be the *application* rather than the XML file
>that specifies which DTD file to validate against.
>

Basically I agree with you. Unfortunately, XML is designed in the 
opposite fashion. Doing what you suggest is pretty much nonconformant 
with the XML 1.0 specification. :-( The EntityResolver hack that's 
been suggested fails in the face of internal DTD subsets and 
documents with unexpected system and/or public IDs. This is a design 
flaw in XML (IMO) and is not really something that can be fixed at 
the level of JDOM.

Schemas do fix this, and explicitly allow you to validate against a 
schema of your choice which is not necessarily the one referenced by 
the document.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo at metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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