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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] FW: Handling of significant whitespace in .NET XmlReader
 Just as a conlcusion of the thread here is the rest of the communication (with consent of Derek), which did run past the list. I believe that this gives a definate answer and that might help others using XmlTextReader. It also gives some outlook into a (hopefully) brighter future. -----Original Message----- From: Derek Denny-Brown [mailto:derekdb@m...] Sent: Donnerstag, 10. Juli 2003 17:48 To: Eckenberger Axel Subject: RE: Handling of significant whitespace in .NET XmlReader > > True. The decision was made to deviate from the letter of the > > standard because it was deemed to be in the best interest of the > > majority of the customers. The information wasn't lost, so other > > customers were not being ruled out. > > I grant you that about 70% - 80% of the xml being processed is data > centric so that's design decision is OK. The problem is that you have > to specify > the > where you deviate from the standard, otherwise developers, like myself, > are > lead to believe that a given XML parser parses XML without altering the > content - which is a fair enough assupmtion if the parser claims to > conform to the XML standard. <rant style="anti-large-company"> Yes, but you have no idea how hard that can be to actually do at a large company. The mere fact that XmlTextReader is _so_ non-conformant by default, (and enabling conformance makes is much slower) was something I strongly argued against. I lost. </rant> > Well that's allright if you start up a project, but we are faily far down > the road ... > > At the start of the project we decided to use .NET (and this at a stage > when > it just had come out! ... brave decision ... ;-) ) because of its > andvantages (and as the logical successor to COM which was defined by our > customer), so open source projects were not really available to us or only > at the high cost of cross language implementations. > > Hoewer, the problem with the parser arose because of a non-documented > non-conforancy that provided a pitfall in which we have promply fallen. If > the problem were discovered early on or we had known about, we could have > saved some precious development time, which in the current situation isn't > freely available anymore. I can say, that the next major release will address much of your concerns. There will be a faster, much more conformant parser, and we will be docing XmlTextReader as the less preferred option. > So what I (as a customer and developer using MS products) would whish for, > is that you (Microsoft) would provide me with all the necessary > information to make an educated desing decision early on in the > project and thus provide > the pitfalls you can step into. I will mention your frustrations. It is good (to me at least) to hear some solid word-from-the-trenches about why standards conformance is so important. It helps me argue for better conformance, and better understand how to mitigate our decisions to choice non-conformant behaviour in some cases. Most excellent to hear that you are using our frameworks, and if you have other issues, feel free to email me directly. Cheers -derek 
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