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Inline, again. > -----Original Message----- > From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@f...] > Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 2:34 PM > To: XML DEV > Subject: Re: The subsetting has begun > > "Cavnar-Johnson, John" wrote: > > > How would standardizing a class of processors that don't process the > > internal subset, entities, etc. jeopardize what you have achieved? If > > there are costs to my proposal that I don't see now, I would like to > hear > > them, but don't impute to me positions that I do not hold. Your > > processor(s) can still handle the documents that these systems would > > produce. If you use the features that are eliminated from the subset, > then > > consumers of your documents would need to use a processor capable > > of dealing with them. Is that cost really significant, and if so, > please > > explain? > > As last week's discussion made clear, such processors are non-conformant > to > the XML Rec. That is the reason de jure not to create documents intended > for > such processors and then call either those documents or those processors > 'XML'. I'm afraid you are begging the question here. I'm specifically advocating a new standard. You are wrong in saying that those documents would not be XML. As I am proposing a strict subset for parser conformance, to claim that these documents would not be XML is factually incorrect. I have snipped a long, interesting and totally irrelevant description of your work. > Now as you say: > > > If you use the features that are eliminated from the subset, then > > consumers of your documents would need to use a processor capable of > > dealing with them. Is that cost really significant, and if so, please > > explain? > > I imagine you now see that I must expect that consumers of my documents > are > using a processor conformant to the XML Rec. Sure, there are plenty of > cases > where what I produce and publish could be handled by some subset parser, > but > worrying about what those cases are, or worrying at all about how any one > consumer of documents has to be treated differently from every other > potential consumer of those same documents, obviates the essential > advantage > of the well-formed-XML-plus-internetwork-topology paradigm. The real question is whether there is an advantage in redefining the meaning of well-formed that obviates the disadvantages. I gather you think not. I disagree. > There is also > a > risk on the other side, which I alluded to in the earlier post. Wherever > the > form in which documents are created is conditioned by agreements between a > creator and its expected consumers, the risk is that they will agree on > out-of-band semantics which allow them to reduce the content of the > document > itself. On the basis of such agreements the 'expected' creators and > consumers become a cartel from which I am excluded, and their documents > become impoverished of information with which I might otherwise perform > useful processing. That cost is not only significant, but potentially > fatal > not only to what I can do today but to the larger promise of XML. Nothing I'm proposing impacts that risk, as far as I can tell.
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