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Re: Partyin' like it's 1999

• To: sean.mcgrath@p...
• Subject: Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:48:05 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <417F8F4A.3000407@p...>
• References: <417F8F4A.3000407@p...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Sean McGrath wrote:


> 1) The lack of sane, simple roundtrippability. I read in some XML, I 
> write it straight back out again. I loose stuff on the way. R u nuts? 
> And you call this a machine processible data format:-)

In my experience if you really care about anything you lose (CDATA 
sections, entity references vs. characters, etc.), that's a serious code 
smell that indicates a major flaw in the stuff. Yeah, the stuff that 
comes out may not be as nicely formatted for humans reading it with more 
or a text editor, but often even that can be fixed with appropriate 
options on the serializer.

I'm not sure exactly what this RIG thing you cited is, or what your use 
case is, but after skimming the spec, my nose is going nuts. This smells 
very bad. Why would anybody ever care about preserving attribute order? 
Why forbid CDATA sections? And section 12.1, "XML 1.0 features that, if 
present in an instance, will cause RCF1 to RCF conversion to fail" 
includes "Presence of control characters in the U+0000 to U+001F range 
other than TAB (U+0009), CR (U+000D) and LF (U+000A)." These are not XML 
1.0 features. If these things show up the document is malformed, 
irrespective of all the extra rules you're piling on top of raw XML. 
There's something deeply wrong here. :-(

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>

• References:
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>

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