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Re: 15 elementary truths about XML

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:03:59 +0000

 >2. A sequence of 8 bits is called a byte. 3. Thus, an XML file is a 
sequence of bytes.

This raises the interesting if somewhat academic question of what XML 
would look like on a machine architecture using bytes or characters of a 
length other than 8 bits.

As far as I can see, it would be entirely conformant to use an encoding 
in which each Unicode character is mapped to a sequence of one or more 
13-bit bytes. The only slight problem is that an XML parser that 
understands this encoding would not be conformant unless it also 
understood UTF-8 and UTF-16; and it's not entirely clear to me how UTF-8 
and UTF-16 would look when stored on a machine with a 13-bit byte length.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: 15 elementary truths about XML
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>

• References:
  • 15 elementary truths about XML
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>