[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Binary versus Text
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:37 AM, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:
You probably need to say something about BOMs. But it's the last sentence that's critical: something is only text if we intend to consume it as text.
That is, a data structure other than a string, and an event stream other than a stream of character events.
The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words, the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly anything that anybody liked. --Lytton Strachey, "Cardinal Manning" GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures
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