[elharo@metalab.unc.edu: Re: [xml-dev] UTF-8+names]

----- Forwarded message from Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> -----

Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 09:17:59 -0400
To: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] UTF-8+names
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org, xml-editor@w3.org

At 7:05 AM -0400 10/22/03, John Cowan wrote:


>XML 1.1 is almost certainly going to ban line breaks in the XML and text
>declarations altogether.  They don't buy anyone anything.

It might affect people who are wrapping to a specific line length, 
especially if they have a longish encoding name.

I can see that this might have been a good idea in XML 1.0. It would 
have made writing a parser simpler. In particular, you could have 
just detected the encoding, and then scanned for the first line break 
before parsing the XML declaration.

However, I don't see the benefit of doing it in 1.1 since parsers 
already have the code to handle line broken XML declarations. Making 
an additional distinction between 1.0 and 1.1 will just make parsers 
a little harder to write since they'll need to special case this 
depending on version. I suspect parsers will use the more complicated 
XML 1.0 algorithm for finding the end of the XML declaration, and 
then just report an error if they see a line break when 
version="1.1". The horse has left the barn on this one.

In either case, I assume you're planning to go back to last call 
then? I don't see anything about this in the candidate recommendation.

-- 

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
  Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

----- End forwarded message -----

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With techies, I've generally found              John Cowan
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Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 09:36:57 UTC