Re: Gag me with a blunt …

[Rob Lugt <roblugt@elcel.com>]

James Clark wrote:
> >I'm not convinced.  The XML spec says that Unicode character #x85 is not
> >a whitespace characters.  It appears from the Note that EBCDIC text
> >files on IBM mainframes represent newline by a byte with code 0x85. The
> >solution appears obvious to me: the EBCDIC encoding table used by the
> >XML parser should map byte 0x85 to Unicode character 0xA.

The note from IBM is arguing that the XML spec is wrong by not designating
#x85 as white space.  So the wording of the XML spec here doesn't seem like
a good reason not to be convinced.  The fix to the EBCDIC coding table may
work but it appears to me that this is something of a hack because the
original software is intending to create Unicode U0085 characters.  I would
prefer for XML parsers to be able to use standard encoding tables - perhaps
from generic libraries rather than having to create a special XML flavour.

Tim Bray replied:

> This feels much better.  And upon reflection, the thought of
> XML files which have been through a mainframe starting to
> percolate around the system with U+0085 embedded inside
> start tags makes me nervous;
<snip/>
> Also, unlike (almost?) all the other XML errata, changing this
> would actively break pretty well every deployed piece of XML
> software in the world.  -Tim

Arguably every deployed piece of XML software is already broken wrt files
containing U+0085.  It appears to me that you (the editors) went to great
lengths to adopt the full Unicode specification rather than creating an XML
subset.  If this was an oversight then I believe it makes sense to make good
the mistake and maintain full support for Unicode.

Regards
Rob Lugt
ElCel Technology