Re: [Exist-open] Re: Missing DOCTYPE declaration WAS eXist removes elements from my documents

[George C. B. <ge...@ox...>]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the insight on eXist, but anyway, I was referring to the 
WebDAV interface, there you have a document and the action through that 
interface is to save and retrieve a document. And my suggestion is to 
give an error (or a warning if that is possible) on the WebDAV interface 
if the document does not match the storage model in eXist. Otherwise 
from a user point of view it is very distracting to see that he gets 
something different back without any warning.

Best Regards,
George
---------------------------------------------------------------------
George Cristian Bina
<oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com


Michael Beddow wrote:
> George Cristian Bina wrote:
> 
>> As for handling DOCTYPE in eXist my suggestion is to
>> just throw an  exception if a document cannot be correctly stored.
>> That means if the  document has a DOCTYPE and the DOCTYPE
>> is not serialized throw an exception and do not allow the file to be
>> saved (as it happens if I want  to save a not wellformed file). If the
>> DOCTYPE is serialized and the document has only an external
>> subset then that should be saved. If the  document has also an internal
>> subset then throw again an exception and do not allow the file to be
> saved.
> 
> I think that suggestion misses the very important points made in Wolfgang's
> last posting. What we have here is an impedance mismatch between an XML
> editor, which users understandably expect to persist the serialized lexical
> form which is their view of their XML encoded document, and an XML database,
> which is designed to store, search, retrieve and reserialize only infoset
> items. In eXist terms, "if the document has a DOCTYPE and the DOCTYPE  is
> not serialized throw an exception and do not allow the file to be saved"
> makes little sense. Unlike an XML editor, eXist does *not* serialize at
> storage time. It parses into an DOM and persists that DOM. When it
> re-serializes at retrieval time, it re-expresses only the infoset items as
> persisted in that DOM.  Nor does eXist operate with "files", except as
> sources of input and sinks for output. So it when it stores a *document* it
> isn't saving a "file" but merely the document's infoset items which were
> encoded in lexical form in that file.
> 
> In other words, there is an important conceptual *and* practical difference
> between storing serialized documents in a filesystem and persisting document
> infosets in a DOM. If that difference can be worked around to allow fuller
> two-way tripping when eXist an application (or a user) wants it to behave
> like a quasi file-system rather than as a DOM persister, then well and good.
> But the notion that non-persistence of a DOCTYPE declaration means that "the
> document cannot be correctly stored" suggests a misunderstanding of what
> eXist is and does (and of the relation between lexical form and infoset
> content). A lot of people would be very unhappy indeed if the undoubted
> desirability of two-way tripping were allowed to make eXist signal an error
> and refuse to store where no error is in fact present, but merely a
> behaviour which is inconvenient for one particular type of application.
> 
> Michael Beddow
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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