[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Blueberry
At Friday, 22 June 2001, John Cowan <jcowan@r...> wrote: >Those "legacy" systems contain a huge amount of well-maintained >data, as someone else (Tim Bray?) pointed out. Anyway, the >only systems that are not "legacy" are the ones still being >designed: Fred Brooks told us 25+ years ago that an implemented >system is an obsolete system. There's a difference between keeping a system up to date and wilfully keeping a system using a technology which makes it incompatible with the rest of the world. Our current world is ASCII and Unicode. If we can make a small, transparent change to accommodate those living on planets like EBCDIC, that is a fine and generous gesture and we should simply do it. Otherwise it must surely up to them to change. >> The time to speak up on this was four years ago. > >A fine attitude to bug-fixing, indeed. If it's a bug. The world is full of old systems which have now been passed by by technology: I'm unconvinced we should be retrofitting all new systems with bugfixes to the obsolete ones. >The reason for introducing a new version of XML (or a new >mark of some sort, anyhow) is to protect old parsers. Allowing >NEL and the Unicode 3.1 name characters changes the definition >of what is a well-formed entity, thus going beyond what an >erratum can fix. As I've already said, it may have been a mistake to predicate XML on the boundaries of another system which was known to be changing, without making provision for changing with it. But that's just history. I still don't see any reason why the changes shouldn't be made so long as it's clear *why* they are being made: I'm just opening the box to see why it ticks. ///Peter
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