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The Internet Principle (was: Some comments on the 1.1 draft)

• To: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Subject: The Internet Principle (was: Some comments on the 1.1 draft)
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 12:32:07 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <003d01c18948$addf7cc0$465169d5@pcukmka> <E16H61N-0007Xy-00@s...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:


> "Be conservative in what you produce, and liberal in what you consume" is the 
> internet mantra..


It used to be.  But as volume rose, and more and more Bad Stuff was
being generated, some applications switched to the conservative/
conservative style.  The first case I know of was when C News decided
to drop Usenet articles with non-standard Date: headers, rather than
using a forgiving-but-expensive parser to try to make sense of them.
The howls were many, but compliance of news posting software went up.

(Return-to-sender isn't feasible on Usenet, where From: lines don't
necessarily contain usable email addresses, and random mixtures of
old-style and new-style news forwarders can cause a flood of
bounce-o-grams for a single posting.)

Similarly, HTML was officially conservative/conservative, in
practice conservative/liberal at first, and eventually liberal/liberal,
causing the well-known race to the bottom ("my browser understands
more disgusting tool-generated hacks than yours does").  At the
insistence of the major HTML browser manufacturers, therefore, XML
adopted a conservative/conservative strategy -- so far quite
successfully.


> That said, even in these cases, I think control characters are not text.

All that is done by line-end characters in XML could be done by
markup, but we do not go so far as to ban them, or even to filter
them out at the parser level.

-- 
Not to perambulate             || John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
    the corridors               || http://www.reutershealth.com
during the hours of repose     || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    in the boots of ascension.  \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel

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  • Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
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