- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 17:53:12 -0400
- To: dgd@cs.bu.edu
- CC: U35395@UICVM.UIC.EDU, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
>You cannot recognize the PI, _without having a list of the magic numbers >for legal PI definitions_. If a user attempts to use a PI that does not >exactly match one of the "the magic number formulas," then the processor >may not even be able to recognize that a PI was present. So the apparent >_self-descriptive_ aspect of the data is _not_ there. Thank you David. This is a point I have felt, but been unable to articulate. >This is true only for all the character sets that _we precode into XML_. It >does not work for any new character set names. The PI looks like it has a >parameter, but in fact the PI, and its parameter, constitute a magic string >of bytes with no internal structure. This is a bit counterintuitive. As is explaining to people that you can do: <?XML-ENCODING "SHIFT-JIS"> ..... but not <?XML-ENCODING "SHIFT-JIS"> .... <?XML-ENCODING "UCS2"> .... >I do not advocate losing the notion. But if it gets intolerable enough, >maybe we can do the right thing after all! I agree with the notion of keeping "in-file" labels, but simply cannot accept "in-data" labelling, or anything that pretend to be like it.
Received on Tuesday, 22 October 1996 17:55:04 UTC