- From: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 100 00:55:57 -0400 (EDT)
- To: timbl@w3.org (Tim Berners-Lee)
- Cc: xml-uri@w3.org
Tim Berners-Lee scripsit:
> I would raelly like not to compromise. There has been a lot of resistance
> to a solution which is clean for the future, based on hoards of existing
> documents.
No, based on the fact that the W3C committed itself to something, and
is morally prohibited from reneging on the commitment without an
explicit change in version, plus the perception that such a change in
version might be very hard to sell, as the perceived advantages are minimal.
> The C preprocessos has got by with allowing #include "foo.h" for many many
> years and the whole C world has not fallen into a pit.
Perhaps this is why all C compilers (AFAIK) insist on reading C code
from a (named) file, never from a mere stream.
> So long as it is OK to build software which absolutizes all URI-references
> when it instantiates the object refered to, then I suppose I could live with
> this in theory. But it would be so misleading as a direction for the future.
Yes, well, it's misleading to allow things like
void foo (int bar[]) { ... }
in C, because it looks like bar is an array of ints rather than what it
really is, a pointer to int. But C still allows that for the sake of
compatibility with B, even though B is a dead language these thirty years.
When you design something that is based on a substrate with real users,
"cleanness" tends to go out the window.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
Yes, I know the message date is bogus. I can't help it.
--me, on far too many occasions
Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 00:29:59 UTC