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

Re: Sweet nostalgia

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Sweet nostalgia
• From: Greg Colyer <greg-xml@e...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 12:38:47 +0000
• In-reply-to: <0EF5CACC-4888-11D8-8ADE-000A95CCC59E@x...>
• References: <57A0905A-4884-11D8-8058-000A95A51C9E@t...> <0EF5CACC-4888-11D8-8ADE-000A95CCC59E@x...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Maybe it's time to trot out the ISO definition of consensus: "the 
absence of sustained opposition". Harder to achieve than a majority, of 
course, but it may sometimes get better results by forcing the 
engagement of two opposing sides until it is achieved.

Hmm, just like the well-formedness constraint! :-)

This is interesting, from Sean McGrath on the diveintomark page:

> Programming languages that barf on a syntax error do so because a partial executable image is a useless thing. A partial document is *not* a useless thing. One of the cool things about XML as a document format is that some of the content can be recovered even in the face of error. Compare this to our binary document friends where a blown byte can render the entire content inaccessible.

I was pondering the other day in this context about the distinction 
between text and binary, or more particularly between a markup language 
and a file format. Perhaps part of the problem is that Rec-XML is a 
little schizophrenic <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-documents>:

> A data object is an XML document if it is well-formed ...

> A textual object is a well-formed XML document if ...

The draconians know that "well-formed XML document" and "XML document" 
are identical: if it's not well-formed, it's not XML! The liberals 
argue: then why is the superfluous term "well-formed" even used? No-one 
talks about a "well-formed JPEG file": it's either correct or it isn't.

I suspect the reason goes back to the fact that XML comes out of HTML 
and SGML, which are markup languages not file formats. In practice 
there's no such thing as a "corrupt HTML file"; it's just a question of 
how the browser will interpret any given soup. XML tries to impose 
file-format type restrictions but expresses them in markup language 
terms. I guess if the draconian position only entered the text after the 
overall architecture of the document had already been written, that 
would be some kind of historical explanation.

Feel free to correct me!

Greg.

• References:
  • Sweet nostalgia
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: Sweet nostalgia
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>

• Prev by Date: RE: re: genx
• Next by Date: Re: [XOM-interest] Re: Unicode forms for internal storage
• Previous by thread: Re: Sweet nostalgia
• Next by thread: Re: Sweet nostalgia
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread