Re: XML Blueberry

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

At Friday, 22 June 2001, John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> wrote:

>Those "legacy" systems contain a huge amount of well-maintained
>data, as someone else (Tim Bray?) pointed out.  Anyway, the
>only systems that are not "legacy" are the ones still being
>designed: Fred Brooks told us 25+ years ago that an implemented
>system is an obsolete system.

There's a difference between keeping a system up to date
and wilfully keeping a system using a technology which makes
it incompatible with the rest of the world. Our current world is
ASCII and Unicode. If we can make a small, transparent change
to accommodate those living on planets like EBCDIC, that is a
fine and generous gesture and we should simply do it. Otherwise 
it must surely up to them to change.

>> The time to speak up on this was four years ago.
>
>A fine attitude to bug-fixing, indeed.

If it's a bug.  The world is full of old systems which have now been
passed by by technology: I'm unconvinced we should be retrofitting all
new systems with bugfixes to the obsolete ones.

>The reason for introducing a new version of XML (or a new
>mark of some sort, anyhow) is to protect old parsers.  Allowing
>NEL and the Unicode 3.1 name characters changes the definition
>of what is a well-formed entity, thus going beyond what an
>erratum can fix.

As I've already said, it may have been a mistake to predicate XML
on the boundaries of another system which was known to be changing,
without making provision for changing with it. But that's just history.
I
still don't see any reason why the changes shouldn't be made so long
as it's clear *why* they are being made: I'm just opening the box to see
why it ticks.

///Peter