[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Principles of XML design

• To: XML List Developers <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Principles of XML design
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 20:56:03 -0400
• In-reply-to: <be524b26c07df26e1469df591cd17742@b...>
• References: <20050506170322.498F52A46A2@m...> <0fa13582277ef91a61197ef274c686b8@r...> <be524b26c07df26e1469df591cd17742@b...>

On May 6, 2005, at 3:45 PM, Chris Burdess wrote:
> XML *is* the syntax. The API is something else - DOM, for instance.

That's what I was saying.

> If people want to preserve the original stream of bytes, they can do 
> so by preserving the original stream of bytes. No XML processor is 
> required to report things like whitespace in tags, whitespace in the 
> prolog or following the root element closing tag, the UTF-16 byte 
> order mark, whether attributes are delimited by apostrophes or quotes, 
> whether ampersands are encoded as & or & or &. All of 
> these issues have been discussed to death in XML Canonicalization.

Same point...

> Not at all. The spec says the order of attributes is not significant. 
> Whether one processor or another chooses to believe that it is 
> significant is irrelevant. Building an expectation of such behaviour 
> will simply leave your users confused and unhappy when they start 
> using another, conformant XML processor without that behaviour and 
> their application is broken.

If you define what a conformant XML processor *is*, I might agree with 
you. If I have a processor that understand the grammar of well-formed 
XML, but emits a boolean value (parsed or not), is that a conformant 
processor?

The point is that the processing is domain-specific, and hence, so are 
the processors... different requirements force different notions of 
"conformant"...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

• References:
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: richard@i... (Richard Tobin)
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Chris Burdess <dog@b...>

• Prev by Date: attribute order
• Next by Date: Re: Principles of XML design
• Previous by thread: Re: Principles of XML design
• Next by thread: Re: Principles of XML design
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread