XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Name

Standalone Document Declaration

Text from specification

The standalone document declaration must have the value no if any external markup declarations contain declarations of: attributes with default values, if elements to which these attributes apply appear in the document without specifications of values for these attributes, or entities (other than amp, lt, gt, apos, quot), if references to those entities appear in the document, or attributes with values subject to normalization, where the attribute appears in the document with a value which will change as a result of normalization, or element types with element content, if whitespace occurs directly within any instance of those types.

Explanation

This laundry list of potential standalone flag violations can be read to mean, “If you have an external subset in your DTD, ensure that your document doesn’t depend on anything in it if you say standalone='yes' in your XML declaration.” A more succinct interpretation would be, “If your document has an external DTD subset, just set standalone to no.”