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re: The J2ME pseudo-XML botch

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: re: The J2ME pseudo-XML botch
• From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
• Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 19:47:25 +0000

[Tim Bray]
 >It's OK to define a custom language for your own purposes, but it's not 
OK at all to use the term "XML" in
 >describing it; this term is very precisely defined and is legally 
protected by the World Wide Web
 >Consortium; anyone who offers software with XML in the name which is 
deliberately non-conformant
 >to the specification is putting themselves in a very shaky position both 
legally and technically.

Interesting.

Basically every XML editor/ETL/database loader I have ever come across is 
non-conformant to
the XML 1.0 specification in some way or other.

The world is full of "xml parsers" that only support bits of XML 1.0. Back 
in 1999 I dubbed it
"gang of four parsing" 
(http://mail.python.org/pipermail/xml-sig/1999-December/001719.html).
(A "parser" that handles start-tags, end-tags, attributes and PCDATA :-).

Heck we even have heavyweights like Dan Connolly writing "XML parsers" in a 
weekend
(http://www.w3.org/XML/9705/hacking). In the comments in the Python parser 
though, we find

"This implementation is not quite complete. There are also some differences 
from the spec."

This is understandable and utterly commonplace in my experience.

I wonder if we were to list here all that XML parsers and XML applications 
we know about and
then zap those that do not meet some aspect of XML 1.0, how many would be 
left standing?

Just last week I found that XMetal 3 does not handle case-sensitive element 
type names. Does that
put it on the same shaky ground as the J2ME subset?

Sean


http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com

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