Re: [syndication] Proper use of DOCTYPE?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> é is a general entity. Specifically it's one of the ISO Latin 1
> characters. To legally use a general entity in an XML document one
> must declare it in a DTD.

So what you're saying is that the use of this entity would require using the
DOCTYPE.  Provided, of course, that the DTD presented in that file had the
entity.  The one for Netscape's simple RSS does have this entity.

http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd

So would they be best informed to reference the DTD or to use the encoding
attribute?  Or both?

Changing their header to read:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE rss SYSTEM "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd";>

(The DOCTYPE taken from Netscape's docs:
http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html)

This assumes, of course, that they're going to be using that particular form of
encoding.  The other choices for korean, russian, japanese, etc.  Or leaving it
out entirely to indicate use of UTF-8 encoding.  And to avoid using entities at
ALL by using the UTF-8 numeric encodings.

As you point out, they could put their own entity definitions in the header.  I
doubt many would really want to be doing this.

> The rules might seem restrictive, but the Draconian Parse is one
> thing that XML got right.

Nope, I'm fine with it.  I think it's a good thing.  The tricky part is getting
a clear explanation as to what's truly useful from the specs.  They aren't
exactly written in ways suited for educating the uninitiated.

Thanks,
Bill Kearney