[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [ Revision #2 ] 15 elementary truths about XML
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote: > 2. As noted above there are no characters in a computer, only bytes. Thus, "An XML document is a sequence of characters" actually means that an XML document is an abstraction of the underlying sequence of bytes. > Technically, no. This isn't correct. XML documents are not required to be in computers, or in late 20th/21st century style digital computers. An XML document printed on paper is still an XML document, as is one stored in an analog computer or some other medium. So would an XML document stored in a computer that used 7-bit or 12-bit bytes or some other non-standard length. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Byte In practice, almost all XML documents stored and exchanged today are encoded with 8-bit bytes (i.e. octets), but that may well not be true forever. For instance we can envision a time when efficiency demands 32, 64, or even 128 bits becomes the minimum addressable unit. Or when bytes are replaced by qubits. As long as these things can still encode text, XML will still be XML. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@ibiblio.org
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