Unix/Java design issues (Was: Re: Is CDATA "structure"?)

[Tom Otvos]

> 
> I originally brought this up re "XML's [specified] auto-conversion of
> CRLF-delimited text records to LF-delimited records".  My 
> concern is that, given Microsoft's market dominance, much of the XML text
that will be
> generated in the near future (or that what comes from legacy 
> data) will use the CRLF delimiter.  When an XML-compliant parser replaces 
> these characters with a single LF, the data will no longer be 
> viewable/editable with simple MS-Windows text tools (e.g. Notepad).  Also,
the original XML data is
> replaced by a converted form (let's ignore entity expansion for the
moment).
> Whilst i'd be the first to concede that LF-delimited data is more compact,
> and easier to parse, i also tend to be conservative (in the literal sense)
> about data handling.  Was this data conversion specified in XML 1.0 so as
to
> be ISO-compliant?  Couldn't have all three common flavors of text
delimiter
> (CR, LF, and CRLF) have been allowed/supported/preserved?  Or am i missing
> some significant design consideration here?
> 

When I started this thread, it was precisely this issue that I was trying to
solve.  Basically expat is (correctly!) condensing all the various types of
end-of-line delimiters and feeding my application LFs.  Since my documents
are created on Macs and PCs, that caused me a bit of grief, which I ended up
dancing around by using multiple CDATA sections and entity-encoding CRs.
This works great in my application, but when I view it in something like
Notepad, or any XML editor that treats CDATA as structure, the CDATA
sections add a lot of visual noise.

-- tomo

Tom Otvos
Director of Research, Pervasive Software Inc.
"Try not! Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda

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