Reply To: XMetaL Author 8.0 Error with XML declaration in external entity

[Derek Read]

The following is a representation of what the resulting expansion looks like and the portion (marked in red) that XMetaL Author is flagging incorrectly as invalid:

External Parsed Entity File:
(made up by me and representing the contents of “simple.ent”)

foo bar

Your Referencing File:


]>
&simple;

Resulting Expansion:


]>

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
foo bar

The XML Recommendation does not seem to explicitly state anything about this exception, but a validating XML processor should not flag it as invalid (most do not). And we agree, otherwise external parsed entities would not be allowed to contain an XML declaration (the PI) but the recommendation clearly states that they “SHOULD” in http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-TextDecl.

Hopefully we'll fix it at some point so that invalid PIs containing “xml” are caught but external parsed entities are not incorrectly flagged.

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