Re: Hard-coded xmloutputversion in nmap.dtd--remove it?

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 12:17:46PM -0500, Kris Katterjohn wrote:
> > Finally, what does every use xmloutputversion for? I notice that the
> > parser in Zenmap never uses it. Is validity (in an XML sense) important
> > to your application? Zenmap's USR files are remarkably invalid yet they
> > get the point across. It could be that xmloutputversion isn't worth much
> > fuss.
>
> So while my answer to this is pretty much "meh", I think that's a good enough
> answer for an opinion on this matter since it means there's no fuss :)  Of
> course this does mean I'll need to update my library again for another change...

Unless I'm mistaken, this shouldn't require changing any parsers, it
should be fully backward-compatible. Instead of saying,
"xmloutputversion has to be '1.02'," we'll say, "xmloutputversion is any
string," and of course "1.02" will continue to be valid. If we ever do
make a backward-incompatible change to the XML output, like removing a
requried element or changing the structure of an element, then we could
create a new DTD that would live with the current one in parallel.

David Fifield

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