[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: version numbers and infosets
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@r...> > People use mainframes, and XML too. If XML 1.0 had insisted > that only CR-LF and LF were acceptable line terminators, don't you > think an argument based on justice for Mac users would have been > appropriate? No, supporting Mac-style line terminators does not need to grandized into an issue of justice (by which John means egalitiarianism, I think*) but * pragmatism: the number of people typing documents in editors on Macs is very large * operational considerations: a programmer generally has control over the line terminators they use, and mainframes are typically programmed * XML 1.0 was starting fresh, and therefore only had SGML and RFC compatability to cope with: XML 1.n must be a trade-off between the particular benefits and the costs in distruption. * CR and LF were in play any way, so a decision on how to support CR alone is necessary even as a matter of error handling * CR is part of ASCII, and so it is low-hanging fruit to adopt. * XML had the 80/20 rule, and I am not sure that NEL would have made it even if it into XML 1.0 in any case. NEL on the other hand is rare, specialist, non-ASCII, and not low-hanging fruit. > "It is intolerable to have no better reason for a legal rule than > that *thus* it was laid down in the time of King Henry the Second." For some reasons, see above. Cheers Rick Jelliffe * IMHO It is not injust if W3C were to decide on only ASCII characters in names, for example. But would be anti-egalitarian, and obviously bad for the market.
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