Letting well-formedness slip: was A milestone in XML

[Marc.McDonald at Design-Intelligence.com]

I put an option in my parser for the pre 1.0 XML style since some of the XML
examples on the net are in that style, the Shakespeare plays for instance.

Marc B McDonald
Principal Software Scientist
Design Intelligence, Inc
www.design-intelligence.com <http://www.design-intelligence.com> 


	----------
	From:  David Megginson [SMTP:david at megginson.com]
	Sent:  Monday, May 17, 1999 9:55 AM
	To:  XML Developers' List
	Subject:  re: Letting well-formedness slip: was A milestone in XML

	Jonathan Eisenzopf writes:

	 > Of course, Matt's correct and I don't think we should back down
on
	 > pressing the issue. It does beg the question, what to do with
older
	 > parsers and XML files? Check the declaration before parsing or
just
	 > ignore and let it fail? As long as it's not built into the parser
	 > one can easily handle the uppercase declarations.

	(I'm not certain that it begs the question, but it certainly raises
	it.)

	Fortunately, there *are* no old versions of XML -- there's nothing
but
	XML 1.0 out there, and the people in the W3C's XML Activity have
	(amazingly, for standards writers) resisted the very strong
temptation
	to fiddle with it for well over a year, now.

	In other words, the problem is how to convert something that is
*not*
	XML (such as CDF, HTML 4.0, TeX, RTF, etc.) to XML.  Since CDF has
	strong similarities to XML, a little Perl might do the trick, but it
	is important to note that CDF is not XML, and since client-side push
	is a double-plus-ungood-stock-price-sinking-dirty-nasty word, I'd be
	surprised if anyone bothered to make it into XML now (people seldom
	enjoy maintaining their failures).

	Now, if there were an XML 1.1, an XML 2.0, etc., we'd have
	version-management problems: it is hard to build a market on a spec
	that is constantly changing.  Fortunately, there's nothing out there
	but XML 1.0, and it turns out to be good enough, warts and all.


	All the best,


	David

	-- 
	David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
	           http://www.megginson.com/

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