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Re: The subsetting has begun

• To: "Cavnar-Johnson, John" <JCavnar-Johnson@s...>
• Subject: Re: The subsetting has begun
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill@d...>
• Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 18:58:21 +0000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <006301c2d9bd$15427b40$6401a8c0@cavnarjohnson>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Cavnar-Johnson, John wrote:

> This specification
> defines a particular application of XML and the style of document that
> that application uses. 

John, you're the third knowledgeable person I've seen claim this in 
as many weeks. This is not an application of XML. Something like 
MathML or RSS is an application of XML. And even if you and I 
couldn't agree on what an XML application is, and we chose your 
definition it still wouldn't be an application of XML. It would be 
an application of an XML Infoset. XML 1.0 is just one possible 
serialization of a SOAP message.


> As long as it doesn't purport to define a
> generalized XML parser, why is it wrong? This application won't accept
> all well-formed XML documents, but so what? 

You might want to read the document. It talks about XML and sings 
its praises, much more that it does the actual subset it defines.

 From a specification viewpoint, what is wanted is the assertion, 
upfront, that this JSR uses a subset of XML, names that subset and 
releases any claims to XML. That  belongs in 1.2, Main Goals and 
Deliverables. That way, we can evaluate the JSR on its own merits, 
not XML's. Anything else is bait and switch.


> Must every application that
> uses XML accept any XML document?  

I think we can dismiss the argument from application.


> What's the danger here?

Briefly it's an economic danger, not a technical one. A technical 
danger one wouldn't so much - we've known since SQL was standardized 
that developers love a challenge. But subsetting ups the cost of 
bridging systems claiming to use XML and that does matter.

Bill de hÓra

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