• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Subject: Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:52:03 -0500
• Cc: 'Bob Foster' <bob@o...>, 'Ronald Bourret' <rpbourret@r...>,'XML Developers List' <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <E1CzNAI-0007ZR-00@u...>
• References: <E1CzNAI-0007ZR-00@u...>
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Michael Kay wrote:


> Of course it doesn't. The biggest single failing in the XML spec, sadly
> unremedied in subsequent versions, is that it doesn't define the information
> content of an XML document. Without that "lossless" cannot be defined, and
> it can't be defined, then it can't be achieved.

Certainly it could be achieved. You could define a 1-1 mapping from the 
binary format to the actual bytes or characters of an XML document. This 
would preserve a lot of things most people don't care about like 
attribute order, numeric character references, and white space in the 
prolog, but it would preserve everything that anyone cares about.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

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