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At 11:21 AM -0400 6/21/01, Mike.Champion@S... wrote: Yeah yeah yeah ... but for better or worse, there is an AWFUL lot of text and software out there that uses those conventions. Most of it is hidden in the machine rooms of the world, out of sight and mind of ordinary nerds like most of us, but it's there nonetheless ... But none of this data is XML! If they're going to convert it to XML, changing the line endings is the least of their worries. and XML is at least being marketed to the people who use it as a way to help them communicate with the rest of the world. The authors of XML very sensibly chose to respect the line ending conventions of Unix, MS, and Macintosh. These were all set "by fiat", no? Actually carriage return and line feed are part of the ASCII standard. Doubtless that's based on somebody's old character set that predates both Apple and Microsoft. Nonetheless it was an agreed upon part of a standards process. IBM's EBCDIC mess wasn't, and that's caused no end of pain over the years. I can only hope that this is the last time we'll have to slay the EBCDIC beast. Were Microsoft's line ending conventions established and maintained by any more democratic and non-monopolistic process than IBM's? Actually yes. The carriage-return linefeed pair is enshrined by the very democratic IETF as the standard line ending convention for most network protocols. I doubt this mattered to Microsoft, but the de facto case is that \r, \n, and \r\n are all much better supported and standard than the extra cruft IBM is trying to push out. What is so wrong with correcting some small oversights on the part of the XML 1.0 WG *before* there is so much XML software out there written by companies that are out of business, or for which the source code has been lost, that it really does become economically impossible to break it? Because we don't need to do it. It will break existing software and systems. We need to draw a line in the sand and say we will not change XML just to make one company's job easier. IBM can fix their own systems. Changing XML is not necessary to support IBM and IBM's customers. If IBM had made this argument pre-XML 1.0 I'd be a lot more receptive. But I do not see a sufficiently compelling need to break all the existing software now just to support this. I don't know enough about the mainframe world to state definitively, but I strongly suspect that small changes to XML will cause much less total disruption than asking for changes by IBM (which they can obviously afford!) *and* the corresponding updates by all their customers. I suspect that we will all be better off in the long run by making XML mainframe-friendly than demanding that the mainframes become XML-friendly. I totally disagree. What happens when Oracle comes along and says they need a change to support their software? (This is happening now in the Unicode world.) What happens when Apple wants a change to support Macs? Or Microsoft wants a change to support their systems? Where does it end? XML has been carefully designed so that it's totally implementable across a range of platforms. XML works on mainframes today. IBM just wants us to adjust the world around it rather than themselves doing the not-all-that-complex job of allowing different line ending conventions in their text editors and other tools. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible (IDG Books, 1999) | | http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764532367/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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