xml-dev - RE: Possible changes for XML 2nd Edition

[Eldar Musayev <eldarm@microsoft.com>]

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: Steve Schafer [mailto:pandeng@telepath.com]
 > I don't see this as a significant issue. If I find that a library
 > function that I'm using is silently swallowing errors of this
 > magnitude, then I'm going to dump the library function and use
 > something else. 
 
...and break the business of your client, when he will go to China, Japan or
Russia.

This proposal is very nice, theoretical, and clean, and as well useless.
It will push the market to create processors which will break the standard,
because it is unreasonable
and this is no good both for technology and standard.
 
Be realistic. You are probably sitting in a comfort of U.S.A. and total
dominance of the English language.
People outside may want just to slip few lines in a text without bothering
themselves with
encoding header. Would you like to add charset information to every XML
document you create?
Because what you are proposing stripes the whole world except few
purely-English language countries
of the convenience of a default charset. And even for English-language
countries, it's a pain 
as soon as business goes international.

In short, non-valid characters are errors, but they should not be fatal.
They just should be reported as
recoverable error or even just warning (not "silently swallowing down",
don't exaggerate) 
and passed through as-is. Otherwise it's technological arrogance.
You know, like some mail programs stripping unknown to it, but perfectly
8-bit characters, replacing them with
question marks and making the whole world wonder, if it's creators are
familiar with 
the expression "none-of-your-business". Seriously.
 
Eldar
 
P.S. I think, proposal of Rick JELLIFFE about soft constraint "character
validity" makes a lot of sense.

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