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Re: Frontline report from the Desperate Fgrep Hacker

• From: Sean McGrath <digitome@i...>
• To: xml-dev@x...
• Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 09:36:49 +0000

[John Cowan]
>I happened to know that the element always appeared on a single
>line of the file: the start tag, the character data, the end tag.

How could you possibly know that? How could you know
that there were no comments that contained matchable lines.
How could you know that there were no entity references which,
when resolved, would yield matchable lines?

It is precisely because you cannot know this with
XML 1.0 that I suggested XFM before christmas and
why I have been chipping in to the work on
SML-DEV. Bottom line: simple grepping of XML 1.0
can get you burnt because of all the things that
can occur in cosher XML 1.0 documents that
a straight lexical analysis will misconstrue unless
prefixed by an XML parser.

Later on in your post you say that this processing
mode is "(sufficiently) reliable". Sorry, no use
to me. I do medical systems. I do e-commerce systems.
"Nearly right" equates to plain wrong in these
environments.

John, you are one of this lists gurus on XML. I am
missing something here right?



Sean,

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Frontline report from the Desperate Fgrep Hacker
    • From: Stefan Haustein <haustein@k...>
  • Re: Frontline report from the Desperate Fgrep Hacker
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@l...>
  • Re: Frontline report from the Desperate Fgrep Hacker
    • From: David Megginson <david@m...>

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