• To: <jim.theriot@p...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 12:37:41 -0500
• In-reply-to: <NDBBKGBEKKCNMDLMKFOIEEGKDJAA.theriot@p...>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <NDBBKGBEKKCNMDLMKFOIEEGKDJAA.theriot@p...>

On Wednesday 19 December 2001 12:29 pm, J C Theriot wrote:
> This argument seems to apply equally against Base64 encoding as it does
> against control characters.

Yes and no. In the BASE64 case, at least you are *explicity* acknowledging 
that the data is outside that representable by XML... but yes, in both cases, 
the only way to reliably deserialize things is by decoding the character 
stream.

The point is then, why complicate things with control characters for no 
benefit whatsoever?

> I think of XML not as a textual markup language, but rather as a layer over
> which markup languages can be defined.  Why is it the job of XML to prevent
> characters that are not appropriate for some classes of markup languages?

It is a *textual* markup language, first and foremost. A markup language is 
different from a "data structuring language", which is closer to what you 
describe. Mr. Snell already pointed out that ASN.1 is the standard  for data 
structuring...

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    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

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    • From: "J C Theriot" <theriot@p...>

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