Re: 12. Are C1 controls and Unicode non-characters disallowed?

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> On 10 September 2012 14:26, Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net> wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Even if it were an added burden on Web devs I have no idea how it breaks
>> the whole point of having MicroXML.  Certainly it would contradict nothing
>> in the stated goals.
>>
>> ...
>>
>
>
> Maybe it's worth going back to that July 2010 discussion on XML-Dev
> which seemed at the time to be the key precursor to MicroXML
> starting with http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/201007/msg00059.html
> and continuing on the subsequent thread (until MicroXML was
> mentioned later at the end of that year).
>
> To quote Andrew Welch's original mailing ('hackable xml')
> "One of the reasons I think non-XML devs struggle with XML is because
> while it looks simple, it's actually very complex - while it appears
> to be just-angle-brackets and can be treated as a string (and often
> is) it really must be parsed and serialised using a specialist tool
> for the job..."
>
> Is making MicroXML less of a 'struggle for non-XML devs' still a goal?
> If so then making it easy to parse MicroXML is surely crucial. In that
> case worries about what has to be excluded as 'illegal' need to be
> minimised don't they?
>
> A problem many developers have is still the exclusion of illegal
> characters and part of that problem is that XML has a different
> set of illegal characters to HTML. Having to check for illegal
> characters which the browser itself doesn't exclude is a pain
> which puts many off using XML. They want such checks to be
> part of the invisible 'magic' functionality that just happens (either
> in the HTML engine or the javascript engine, say, though they'd
> rather not have to worry about where it happens either). If the
> lowly developer has to deal with it they get into that ugly problem
> that a parser can't parse the XML because it isn't valid and so they
> have to find a way to exclude such illegal characters without the
> help of a ready-made parser. It isn't nice.
>
> If this is a key factor putting off developers (or if they find they are
> using tools which don't do it all for them and that gives them hell)
> then if MicroXML doesn't solve that, how does it hope to get take
> up from such developers? Maybe though, these aren't the type
> of developers being targeted by MicroXML, in which case I stand
> corrected.
>

Writing language parsers is a skill.  Sadly not all developers gain that
skill.  If you do not have that skill you probably shouldn't even be trying
to write a JSON parser.  Heck, you probably shouldn't even be trying to
write a config file parser ;)

Luckily there are plenty of people for every language and platform who can
write parsers, and most other developers just do the simple, sane thing:
they reuse libraries created by the experts. It would be crazy to make it a
goal of MicroXML that every odd developer could write his own parser.

As to the matter at hand, anyone with those basic parser development skills
will find dealing with the proposed character production pretty much
trivial.


-- 
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