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Re: Re Whitespace

• From: Sean Mc Grath <digitome@i...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 15:13:43 +0100

Sorry for the lateness of this reply. It got a bit lost in my out-box for a
while!

[Sean Mc Grath]
>>Throw out that grep, that text editor, that fgets(), that diff,sort,uniq
>>utility There all busted for XML use.
>
[David Durand]
>gets is of course Broken As Designed, as the cause of most security bugs in
>Unix systems.

Sorry David, I cannot let you get away with that one. I said *fgets()* which
is an entirely different function to gets(). It takes
three paramaters one of which is the maximum number of characters to read.
It is not Broken As Designed.

>
>Again, they are broken for XML use with files created a particular way.
>They are also broken for HTML files created the same way, and I don't hear
>the weeping and wailing.

No weeping and wailing required because it is typically possible to splice in
line-ends into HTML *without affecting the content*. This is not the case
with XML.

>Can you suggest any solution to the "grep" problem other than requiring a
>fixed line-max in XML.

Yes. Ignore all line ends. I know this presents its own set of difficult
problems
but I'd prefer to tackle these - and maintain compatability with a decades worth
of tools - rather than break the tools.

> Do you think that that hideous hack to accomodate
>defective (if very useful) tools is really worth it.
Yes. Line oriented text processing has been a hugely popular paradigm for
many years now. I don't think of these tools as "defective" at all. I dare
say many wielders of these tools are of the same opinion. These people will
be rightly miffed at the suggestion that they are defective by virtue of the
use of a line oriented paradigm. They will also be rightly miffed that they
cannot bring their tools/skills to bear in the XML world.

>Can you suggest how we
>would determine that buffer size?
Question is Broken As Designed. No need for a silly fixed limit. Just a
recognition
of the existence *of* limits and a standardised mechanism for dealing with them.

Sean Mc Grath
sean@d...
www.digitome.com



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