Streams, protocols, documents and fragments

[Borden, Jonathan]

> 	I still think all of this is being over-complicated - but then
> maybe I'm the one who's missing something, so let's see.
>
> 	I don't follow why so many suggestions to resolving this problem
> involve stepping 'outside of' XML 1.0. We have suggestions for sync
> characters like ^C and ^L, we have the proposal that XML 1.0 should be
> fundamentally altered to allow the concept of a 'not well-formed'
> document (or one that may *become* well-formed at some point in the
> future), we have proposals for documents that contain subsets of
> validity. All of these suggestions seem to go against the grain of what
> XML is about.
>

	Mark, I think it is just a simple implementation issue. We have XML parsers
whose model is one XML document per stream (e.g. java inputStream). A
multi-doc protocol can chop the stream into sub-streams to be passed to the
XML parser. By employing an external delimiter, the protocol doesn't need to
understand or parse the XML itself in order to detect "end-of-doc" even
though the logical information is there. Otherwise the protocol
implementation needs to understand XML syntax in order to detect
"end-of-doc"

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


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