XML Common Syntactic Constructs

Some of the constructs available in an XML document are no longer visible at the interface in COBOL, and in some cases the visibility depends on the type of processing.

Construct / Property	Structure-oriented	Event-oriented
Numeric character reference	Replaced by the corresponding character
	If no representation is available in the target encoding, the replacement character is supplied.	If no representation is available in the target encoding, the national represen-tation is supplied, i.e. the CONTENT-NATIONAL-CHARACTER event.
Predefined entity	Replaced by the corresponding character
General entity	Replaced according to the available definition
Internal Document Type Definition (DTD)	Used to define entities
	Not used to validate the document
	Not supplied1	Supplied in one piece
External DTD	Used to define entities
	Not used to validate the document
	Not supplied
Defaulted attribute from DTD	Supplied; cannot be distinguished from the attributes which are specified directly in the XML document	Supplied; can be distinguished from the attributes which are specified directly in the XML (event = DEFAULTED-ATTRIBUTE-NAME)
Schema	Not supported
Text declaration	Interpreted
	Not supplied2	Supplied in three parts: first VERSION-INFORMATION, then ENCODING-DECLARATION, finally STANDALONE-DECLARATION
Processing instructions	Not supplied1	Supplied in two parts: first PROCESSING-INSTRUCTION-TARGET, then PROCESSING-INSTRUCTION-DATA
Comments	Not supplied1	Supplied in one piece
CDATA section	Component part of the values supplied; no longer recognizable	Supplied in three parts: first START-OF-CDATA-SECTION, then CONTENT-CHARACTERS, finally END-OF-CDATA-SECTION
Namespace declaration	Not supplied; however, interpreted when used in element or attribute names	Supplied in one piece
Data im mixed content	Combined to form a single value	Supplied in parts; fragmentation can also be caused by entity references.
Handling end of line, file record structure, etc.	Suppressed or forwarded in standard manner according to options (concerns external entities and documents in files)	Suppressed or forwarded in standard manner according to options (concerns external entities only; the document itself is already contained in memory)
Well-formed structure of the document	Irregularities determined ahead of processing	Irregularities detected only in the course of processing
Determining the document’s encoding	From the definition of the memory area; If the memory area is alphanumeric, the exact EBCDIC variant is determined from the content, i.e. any encoding declaration which exists is determined.
	From file attribute and file content

¹ No language elements provided to describe it in COBOL
² Language elements provided in order to supply the encoding name from the encoding declaration, but currently not supported