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From: "Jonathan Robie" <jonathan.robie@d...> > At 08:35 AM 4/1/2003 -0800, Dare Obasanjo wrote: > > >In my experience faithful lexical round tripping is mainly important to > >applications that act as editors. In such cases, the people requesting > >such features in an API want even more requirements than XML 1.0 deems > >necessary such as preserving attribute order and all whitespace. > > Yes, it's clearly helpful for that. I also know from XML databases I've > worked with that people really do get upset if you change namespace > prefixes when they import a document and export it again - but most editors > and databases do seem to sacrifice some faithfulness in their lexical > round-tripping. One important application of XML is as source code. Imagine if a programming editor opened your Perl/Python/C#/Java/C++/SQL program, renamed names of modules or classes or private methods or packages, and threw away comments. You would undoubtedly spew, despite your admirably easy-going nature. Someone wrote: > >If the Information Set says that there is no distinction between <foo > >"a"/> and <foo 'a'/>, why should I work hard to preserve the > >distinction? Because syntactic sugar is vital for humans, and can help processing. This here thread comes out of a complaint about XML being too complex to use regexes. Yet if we canonicalize our data (say, including that only <foo x="a" /> is used ) then the regular expressions simplify themselves to something much more useable. If other software messes up this canonical form, then we have to re-canonicalize it. (Which suggests not that we should work hard to preserve the distinction, but that if it is convenient we should support it.) Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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