Microsoft's responce to XML.com article

Simon St.Laurent simonstl at simonstl.com
Fri Jan 14 04:40:35 GMT 2000


At 11:56 AM 1/14/00 +0900, Jun Fujisawa wrote:
>The article states that "you will see much better than 87 or
>88 percent of XML files exchanged between Msxml.dll and
>other parsers actually achieve interoperability".

My favorite moment comes near the end, where they say:
>Do you always pad parameter entities with whitespace or only when 
>they are not inside literals? We say yes. 

Er, yes to what?

My main gripe about the MS parser is its bizarre rules for namespace
support, demanding #FIXED declarations for namespace attributes.  (We've
been around this one a few times, and I haven't come anywhere near to
convinced by the MS arguments.)

I've also got a lot of complaints about its integration with IE 5.0 (though
some of those have been fixed with IE 5.01), but most of those aren't the
parser per se.

I'd love to see another round of comment on the comments, however.  It
seems like there are enough people around with a deep understanding of the
conformance tests (i.e., the people who built them) to report on the four
'hotly contested differences' listed.  Perhaps the <![CDATA[ ]]> (they
missed a bracket) question should be added to my 'great controversies' list...

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

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