I sincerely apologize for bringing this to the attention of the xml-dev list. I thought the behavior of not supporting and expanding internal entity references with the "default" ways to load and read XML documents with XMLDocument, XSLTransform, and XMLTextReader was by design.
If I had thought there be a defect in the .net framework I would have submitted a defect report to Microsoft.
There has been a fair bit of buzz lately about not having entity references in SOAP, so I had presumed Microsoft was encouraging the world to adopt an entityless existances. I do find entity references quite useful in the maintainability of XSLT programs and would like to be able to use them in SOAP messages (although I think that is not to be given the WS-I profile, which precludes SOAP messages with DOCTYPES).
I am not even convinced that the best default behavior is to load any XML 1.0 document (although I lean that way) because of reports of attacks on software components based antagonistic entity reference declarations. I am not familliar with these types of attacks myself. We don't want programs to blow up by default either.
Doug Ransom
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dare Obasanjo [mailto:]
> Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 6:17 AM
> To: Mike Champion;
> Cc:
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Internal entities removed from XML?
>
>
> Mike,
> We have a bug which caused the behavior Doug Ransom saw.
> Please do not treat a bug in one of our implementations of an
> XML parser as indicative of any imagined Microsoft position
> towards the W3C XML 1.0 recommendation.
>
>
>
