Re: XML Chunk Equality

Martin Duerst wrote:

> I think that first and foremost, the finding should be written in
> a way that goes not give the impression that perverse stuff is actually
> normal. In my opinion, any discussion about case equivalence outside
> US-ASCII would easily give the oppinion that xml:lang values outside
> US-ASCII make sense, which we very much agree on that they don't.

Perhaps we agree here. Perhaps we don't. It's not quite clear. I think
the finding should state that characters are compared by mapping a-z to
A-Z and all other characters are compared by code point. But at least to
that extent it has to be discussed. We don't need to to explicitly
address characters outside the ASCII range. That can just fall under
characters that aren't in the range a-z or A-Z. Would that be acceptable
to you?

> If this is really that seriously an issue, I propose that we ask
> the XML Core WG to issue an erratum that changes the sentence in
> question:
>     The values of the attribute are language identifiers as defined
>     by [IETF RFC 3066], Tags for the Identification of Languages,
>     or its successor; in addition, the empty string MAY be specified.
> to something like:
>     The values of the attribute MUST be language identifiers as defined
>     by [IETF RFC 3066], Tags for the Identification of Languages,
>     or its successor; in addition, the empty string MAY be specified.
> 

That would be a substantive change in the spec, not a clarification or
an error correction. Such a change requires a new version of XML, not a
mere erratum.

> Due to the way 'error' is defined
> (see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-error), parsers MAY
> detect and report this, although probably they won't, because
> it's difficult to check and impossible to make the check
> future-proof.

Errors that are neither well-formedness errors nor validity errors are a
real pain and a major source of interoperability problems between
different parsers. I certainly don't want to add to this list.


-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
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

Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2004 09:43:23 UTC