Feeling good about SML

[David Brownell]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> At 11:54 AM 11/16/99 +0000, Sean Mc Grath wrote:
> >I see this as nothing more than codifying existing
> >practice. There are lots of parsers that claim
> >to be XML parsers but when you look closely they
> >don't do X,Y and Z per the specification.
> 
> Is that really true?  The parsers out there in the field seem to
> make heroic efforts to cross all the t's and dot all the i's.

Yes, really true.  Consider just a dozen Java parsers; they're
more or less all over the map with respect to T's and I's:

    http://www.xml.com/pub/1999/09/conformance/index.html

Although noises I've received from a variety of vendors lead
me to believe that things are going to be getting better, the
current state of things is that quite a lot of "XML parsers"
haven't done some of the _easy_ (!) bits of T-crossing and
I-dotting, making sure widely available conformance test cases
are handled right.  (That's not only for Java processors.)

That said, I'm not sure that the nonconformance issues will
very often fit into neat categories as Sean suggests.  The
notion of a sub-profile of "full XML" doesn't seem to have
been anyone's guiding principle, at least among processors
that I've looked at.

- Dave

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