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David Brownell wrote: > I think that's the key point. It creates "islands of (non)interoperability", > fragmenting a landscape that really deserves stabilization instead of > more earth tremors. Not that much of a tremor, I think. > As it stands, > the XML 1.0 spec is effectively independent of changes from the > Unicode consortium, but still leverages Unicode where it's most > essential (representation of text, not markup). Correct. > That hypothetical situation differs in at least one key respect from > this real one with IBM. Macintosh users have always had access > to ASCII, while it seems this IBM line-end is a legacy from the days > that IBM fought ASCII because it was too open, and threated to > decimate their cardpunch/terminal/... margins by facilitating the > creation of interoperable commodity infrastructure. ASCII or EBCDIC is not the issue. The question is, of the 65 available control characters in 8-bit character sets, which one or ones are you going to use for the logical "line end" function? Mainframes use NEL, other systems use CR or LF or CR/LF. NEL has been around for a long time even in the ASCII world: the ISO 2022 7-bit equivalent of 0x85, which is 0x1B 0x44 (aka ESC D) has been supported by ANSI X3.64 terminals since VT100 days. -- There is / one art || John Cowan <jcowan@r...> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein
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