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RE: Subsetting/ Canonical Parsers/ XML Compliance/ etc.

• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@e...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 01:24:51 -0800

>> XML *syntax* compliance (especially for well-formend parsers)
>> is relatively easy to achieve, and should be the basis upon
>> which we can build *reliable* applications. If you can't
>> trust the foundations, you're toast.
>I'm having trouble reconciling this assertion with David Brownell's
>results (see
http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/05/10/conformance/conformance.html ).

As you can see from that particular report, conformance is still overall
very high (about 90%) and the errors that *do* occur generally fall into
either encoding issues, or issues with later specifications (namespaces
in particular).

As I said earlier, the 80/20 rule applies to basically any standard, and
the places where people run into issues are outside the "80%" mark. Given
that people continue to demand conformance, I see no reason why even
better conformance will be achieved. All the vendors that I've dealt with
seem committed to supporting as much of the standard as is possible
(including ourselves).

Practically, how many problems have you really encountered with XML
conformance?

I think if you take any relatively recent standard (less than 6 years
old), and test conformance, you'll find plenty of gray areas. C++,
JAVA, J2EE, SGML, HTML, CSS, DOM, EcmaScript, ISO 2022, NFS, SMB,
FOSI, DSSSL, POSIX, and HTTP itself all spring to mind as standards where
100% conformance isn't the rule. I think XML is doing *very* well
by these standards given it's relative immaturity.

People are getting plenty of useful work done using XML (Cisco says
it's saving 100's of  millions of dollars a year for example). I
very much doubt that *syntactic* interoperability is holding them
back... from what I've seen it's the BPR and schema interoperability
that are the hot spots right now.

• References:
  • RE: Subsetting/ Canonical Parsers/ XML Compliance/ etc.
    • From: Mike.Champion@S...

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