How to disable xml validation

Question

I'm trying to write an SVG parser using Xerces. The problem is that when the SVG file contains the doctype tag <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">my program throws the following exception:
java.net.UnknownHostException: www.w3.org
        at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:177)
        at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:507)
        at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:457)
etc.If I remove <!DOCTYPE> tag, it works fine. According to what I read here, it's necessary to disable XML validation. The Xerces API documentation says that there is a method setValidation() in org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser but I can't locate it. Moreover, I don't see any org.apache.xerces.framework package in Xerces supplied with NetBeans 5.0 nor in Xerces 2.8.0 downloaded from apache.org (the XMLParser class available to me is located in org.apache.xerces.parsers).
My question is simple:
How to disable XML validation if the setValidation() method is not avaliable
OR
how to make the setValidation method available to my program?
I'm really confused :(
Here is the code:
package svgviewer;
import java.io.File;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import org.w3c.dom.traversal.*;
import org.apache.xerces.parsers.*;
public class SVGFileParser {
    public void parse(String filename) throws Exception {
        File file = new File(filename);
        DOMParser parser = new DOMParser();
        parser.parse(file.toURL().toString()); //exception is thrown if doctype tag is present in the svg file

Answer 1

You're solving the wrong problem here. Turning off validation won't help, because DTDs don't only do validation. Even non-validating parsers have to read the DTD in case it contains entity definitions, for example.
If you want to stop the parser from looking for the DTD then you write a EntityResolver and apply it to the parser. The EntityResolver should be just like the one in the example in the API docs except it should return new InputSource(new StringReader("")).