DYNAMIC NETWORK CONFIGURATION
Charles E. Perkins · 1999
XML information set. The XML 1.0 Recommendation says a lot about the syntax of XML documents and the character sequences that constitute the markup in them. It is useful, though, to be able to describe XML documents in a more abstract sense—to talk about elements and attributes without reference to the delimiters used to express them, and so on. The XML Information Set, when completed, will provide a com- mon reference for talking about the abstract objects that make up an XML document. XML fragments. Particularly when dealing with large XML documents, it can be useful to extract a fragment and do something with just that frag- ment. Working with fragments often requires knowing something about the source document. This might be simply so that the fragment can be put back in place after editing, or it could be that processing the fragment requires knowledge of, say, how many chapters preceded this one. The XML Fragments Recommen- dation, when released, will define what can constitute a fragment and also how to express its context. Canonical XML. XML documents that would be treated as equivalent by most applications might nevertheless differ in their physical representation. For example, two equivalent XML documents might differ on such issues as comments, ordering of attributes, character encoding, and insignificant white space within tags. These differences make it impossible to test the equivalence of two XML documents just by comparing them at the byte level. The Canonical XML specification will describe a standard for XML documents such that logically equiva- lent documents will have the same byte-for-byte representation. This canonical form of the document will have particular application in digital signatures.