[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
Robin Berjon writes: > The bottom line is this: it doesn't really matter. Or rather, of > course specifications have to be reliable over time, but they > certainly do not need to be perfectly reliable â just reliable enough > to be trustable by pragmatic companies. Without commenting on the many other interesting issues on the table in this thread, that's just too simple. I believe it really depends on the context and the application, and XML is used for many, many things. One can easily imagine mission critical applications in which agreement on content is with reference to XML 1.0. Note that SOAP 1.2 does just this to ensure that all SOAP nodes can deal with exactly the same content. So, maybe the downstream code isn't robust against the new characters, because it's understood that they are filtered early, perhaps by an XML parser, perhaps by some other XML-aware code. Maybe the parser gets updated to handle XML 1.0 5th edition and someone doesn't notice the dependency. Can you argue that in a carefully run network these errors will be caught before causing trouble? Yes, I think so. Does reusing the XML 1.0 "brand", which until now has been very stable as to what content is required significantly raise the risk that someone somewhere will be processing content that their code wasn't designed to deal with or tested against? I think so. You are right that there are many situations in which "reliable enough" and "pragmatic" are the right bars to set. I think it's too facile to say that there aren't others who reasonably rely on a specification like XML 1.0 to be much more stable than that. I'm not entirely sure, but I really do think both sides of the question need to be explored quite dispassionately. My own personal leaning (though not necessarily my employer's), is that 5th edition is probably on balance a bad step and a bad precedent. Interestingly, I could probably live with an XML 1.2 that allowed just the same content as 5th edition, and that made the XML declaration at the beginning optional, as it is in 5th edition. The key difference is that anyone who says that they're depending on XML 1.0, or who asks for an XML 1.0 parser reliably gets the old rules. If someone wants the new rules, they ask for an XML 1.2 parser, or a parser running in "1.2 mode". Having a stable name for your specification is as important as determing what's on the wire. I lot of my problem with 5th edition is that it use the XML 1.0 brand for both the old and the new content, which makes it very tricky to specify what you want when. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/#soapenv -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
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