XML 1.1 requires entity resolution, XInclude processing, and more

There's a probably unintentional interaction between the XML 1.1 
draft and the Character Model that requires a non-validating parser 
to resolve all external entity references, process XIncludes, and 
more.

XML 1.1 requires that all documents be in include normalized form as 
defined by the character model. However, that requires that all 
includes be resolved first, just to do well-formedness checking. 
According to the character model, "An include is an instance of a 
syntactic device specified in a language to include an entity at the 
position of the include, replacing the include itself. Examples of 
includes are entity references in XML, @import rules in CSS and the 
<xsl:include> element in XSLT. Character escapes are a special case 
of includes where the included entity is a single character." 
XIncludes aren't mentioned, but they're clearly implied as well. 
Non-validating processors can no longer ignore external entities of 
whatever kind. They must be resolved before well-formedness checking 
can be completed.

I can't believe this was intentional. Frankly, I think that requiring 
normalization at all is too onerous. I note that even the Canonical 
XML working group, for whom normalization made a lot more sense, 
specifically rejected such a requirement 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n#NoCharModelNorm>. My preferred 
solution is not to issue XML 1.1 at all for reasons I have elucidated 
earlier. My second best solution is not to require any normalization. 
My third best solution is to remove the requirement that documents be 
in include-normalized form, and simply require Unicode-normalized 
text instead.
-- 

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| Elliotte Rusty Harold |  | Writer/Programmer |
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|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
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