[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
On Thursday 20 December 2001 04:31 am, Michael Kay wrote: > This is unrealistic. They aren't your character sequences, they are > something that someone else put in a database donkey's years ago, and it's > your job to ship them somewhere else without asking any questions. That's not necessarily textual data though. I understand the issue here, and also understand why people might want this, but I can't a good cost/benefit ratio. One way or another these things will have to be interpreted/decoded, so why not use some other mechanism? We've already hear PI's and entities (not numeric character references as they're a lexical structure) proposed. > There's a purist approach, which says that once you move data using XML, > you have to label it properly, which means you either have to make sure > it's 100% clean before transmitting it, or you have to label it as binary. "Be conservative in what you produce, and liberal in what you consume" is the internet mantra.. > And there's a pragmatic approach, which says that the data is supposed to > be text, and I want the benefits of treating it as text, but if for any > reason a control character has kept in (perhaps due to inadequate input > validation when the data was first entered), then that's part of the data > I've been given and it's not my job to fix it, I'm only the messenger. To me, that's either a bug or a kludge. > PS: And of course there are some situations where control characters can > legitimately appear in text. Am I the only one who remembers putting a BEL > character in error messages and delighting as the teletype went "ping!"? > The joy went out of that when the bell was emulated by electronic beeps, > but one day, your database of 1960s classic software error messages is > going to find a BEL in it. You should see some of my animated ASCII christmas cards ;-) That said, even in these cases, I think control characters are not text.
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