[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?
• From: Alan Kent <ajk@m...>
• Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:09:11 +1100
• In-reply-to: <013901c18912$581fcbe0$4bc8a8c0@A...>; from Rick Jelliffe on Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 03:54:02PM +1100
• Mail-followup-to: xml-dev@l...
• References: <5C39F806F9939046B4B1AFE652500A3A251A0B@R...> <013901c18912$581fcbe0$4bc8a8c0@A...>

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 03:54:02PM +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> Sure, lets make XML unsuitable for use in UNIX pipes by allowing ^D.
> And for Perl and Python text-processing programs that use standard in and 
> expect EOF (^D or ^Z).

I cannot speak for all of the languages, but you certainly can send ^D
down a UNIX pipe. I think you are mixing up the tty processing of human
input and what is implemented in the OS/programming language. I don't
think many people will by typing in XML documents by hand down a pipe! :-)
Oh, and with UNIX I think you can send a ^D anyway by typing ^V^D
(depending on your shell).

I think if you said NUL your arguments may be stronger. I have less
confidence utilities like 'grep' would work correctly with a file
with NUL bytes in them. I agree that a strength of XML is that lots
of existing non-XML text utilities (grep, awk, per, etc) can be used
(carefully!!!) with XML. Allowing control characters directly in
the text stream would surely make one of them break.

Of course if you used � to encode NUL in text then that would not
be an issue. But I dislike this because its not in line with SGML.
I guese there is always the PI proposal - that is, use processing
instructions for control characters. This could be done as a SOAP
convention, for example. But it feels distinctly grungy.

Alan

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• References:
  • RE: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...>
  • Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• Prev by Date: Re: XML and mainframes, yet again (was RE: Some comments on the 1.1 draft)
• Next by Date: Supporting Unicode (was Some comments on the 1.1 draft)
• Previous by thread: Re: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?
• Next by thread: Re: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread