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Re: Non-infoset

• To: Alessandro Triglia <sandro@m...>
• Subject: Re: Non-infoset
• From: Bob Foster <bob@o...>
• Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:11:13 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <1.3.200504102336.60807@m...>
• References: <1.3.200504102336.60807@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217

Alessandro Triglia wrote:

> What I am trying to determine is to what degree those "choices" of XML 1.0 are relevant to a creator **in that they convey information in the creator's intentions**.  (I am not suggesting in any way that XML 1.0 does not need those choices!)  If they are irrelevant to a sufficient number of creators and in different situations, then the infoset is important.

What tool? If you hypothesize some universally used tool that solves all 
the problems of XML authoring without the need for entities, 
apostrophes, etc. then you've predetermined the answer. But the vast 
majority of XML authors don't use any such tool and aren't likely to 
start. Plain Old Text still reigns supreme, despite the many predictions 
of its demise.

> The existence of a large number of people that need to see entity references unexpanded and need to see CDATA sections as such and need to play with whitespace inside tags etc., does not prove that the infoset is not important -- unless they were the vast majority of creators, which I seriously doubt.

Yes, in your hypothetical universe (how's the weather in there?) you are 
probably right. ;-}

But back in this world I can come up with many examples where it is 
essential to see entity references unexpanded, such as &copyright;, 
&title;, &chapter3;, &publication-date;, etc. where the unexpanded names 
have a quite different meaning than their literal expansion at the time 
of writing. The fact that you didn't see this yourself or don't believe 
there is any significant audience for it only suggests you don't spend 
much time in DocBook or other XML publishing software.

Actually, your posts about Fast Infoset up to this thread have been most 
informative. I don't think most of us in the XML community have much 
knowledge of, or any particular need to know about, the Infoset. I 
learned something, and I agree there's a community that can make good 
use of Fast Infoset. But I don't have any way to count how many are in 
that community and how many aren't, and if there is any way to get these 
numbers, spinning hypotheticals in newsgroups isn't it.

Bob Foster

• References:
  • Non-infoset
    • From: Alessandro Triglia <sandro@m...>

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