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Dr Sperberg-McQueen,
At 11:45 PM 4/26/2009, you wrote: On 21 Apr 2009, at 16:48 , Wendell Piez wrote:I take it the recipient of the data knows that by requiring XML with only single quotes used as attribute value delimiters, they are asking for XML-that-is-not-XML? Yes, I suppose it's a bit harsh, but only a bit. Maybe not XML-that-is-not-XML, but hyper-XML. If memory serves, ISO 8879 referred to rules of this kind as "application conventions". So they have always been part of the story of generic markup. Indeed, and I recognize the usefulness of application conventions (I hope my Balisage paper gets accepted); in fact I advocate them all the time. But there's also a big difference between such a convention with respect to application semantics (where indeed such conventions are the grist of the mill) and such a convention that does nothing for semantics, but only restricts the tools that can be used. I also acknowledge that there may be good reasons for such conventions (desperate hackers included), which is why I try to be nice (I do!). But (as you know) they should be well-controlled and carefully scoped, or they will bite you. The very fact that the OP had to ask XSL-List how to get a serializer to impose a non-standard syntactic restriction is an indication of something. Frankly, if the naming and design rules for prominent XML vocabularies can require the use of specific namespace prefixes for specific namespaces, and expect to elicit conformance instead of incredulous laughter, well, then I guess application conventions are alive and well and living among us. (I confess that my response was incredulous laughter, but that didn't persuade them to change the rules.) Don't get me started on the confusion sown by namespaces into this area. (Which isn't meant as a criticism of namespaces, as I don't have an alternative to suggest. Just an observation.) There may well be SAX serializers which accept an invocation-time parameter to prefer single quotes when emitting attribute values (I've never looked so I don't know). If there aren't, it really shouldn't be too very hard to write one, to pair it with a SAX parser, and to put together a filter that will normalize any XML input by emitting it with single quotes only around attributes. Or, as I said to the OP, write yourself a hyper-XML-syntax serializer that does what you want using the XSLT output method="text". Start with Evan Lenz's XML-to-string converter (http://www.xmlportfolio.com/xml-to-string/), which will save you some work. Isn't this monstrous? (See, I can be pragmatic too. :-) Cheers, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================
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