Musings

In light of that long list, “fixing” OpenSP might not be an option. Perhaps, better, to use a real XML parser for validating XML documents.

Brian Koberlein uses it. Phil Ringnalda used to use it (until, for some reason he converted to WordPress, and then stopped blogging). And I know of at least one non-public blog that uses it.

Maybe there are more; but they’ll have to step forward and say so.

Yes, I agree with you that removing, from the identifier, any vestige which would identify the subject-area of a preprint is a mistake.

Even if you want an arXiv-wide numbering scheme, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have identifiers that looked like math.AG/0705.0127 or hep-th/0705.0128. Note that these, though consecutively-received preprints, could be retrieved from a URL structure based on the above stems, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/math.AG/0705.0127, just like the current system.

If it’s any consolation to you, they didn’t consult with me about it.

MTValidate is, already a fork of the W3C Validator, so the patch won’t be directly applicable to your code. But, at least, it should give you an idea …

--- mtvalidate-0.3/MTValidate.pl        2004-06-24 17:49:47.000000000 -0600
+++ mtvalidate-0.4/MTValidate.pl        2006-11-28 10:08:39.000000000 -0600
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
- -# MTValidate 0.3
- -# $Date: 2004/06/20 14:18:33 $
+# MTValidate 0.4
+# $Date: 2006/11/26 14:18:33 $
 
 # by Jacques Distler <distler@golem.ph.utexas.edu>
 # original by Alexei Kosut <akosut@cs.stanford.edu>
@@ -108,6 +105,7 @@
        -DefaultConfig    => { 
                               SGML_Parser       => '/usr/bin/onsgmls',
                              SGML_Library      => "$vdir/sgml-lib",
+                             XHTML_Check       => 0,
                             },
       );
     my %cfg = Config::General->new(%config_opts)->getall();
@@ -587,6 +585,30 @@
    $T->param(context => "entry");
 }
 
+# Hack to overcome shortcomings of onsgmls:
+# Reparse with an XML parser and see...
+if ($File->{'Is Valid'} && !($#{$File->{Warnings}} >= 0) && $CFG->{XHTML_Check}) {
+   use XML::LibXML;
+   my $parser = new XML::LibXML;
+   $parser->line_numbers(1);
+   eval {
+      for (@{$File->{Content}}) {
+        $parser->parse_chunk( $_ . "\n" );
+      }
+      $parser->parse_chunk("", 1);
+   };
+   if ($@) {
+        my $messages = $@;
+
+        # Line-number indicators begin on a new line
+        $messages =~ s{[^\x0d\x0a](:\d+:)}{\n$1}g;
+
+        # Strip Perl line numbers from error message.
+        $messages =~ s{[^\x0d\x0a]+[\x0d\x0a]$}{};
+
+        &add_warning($File, "Error:",  "<pre>" . encode_entities(decode_entities($messages)) . "</pre>" );
+   }
+}
 
 if ($File->{'Is Valid'} && !($#{$File->{Warnings}} >= 0) ) {
     $T->param(VALID => MTV_TRUE);

That’s it.

I’m sure a modicum of effort could produce a more polished result, but this was good enough for my purposes.