Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> I'd say a thousand or so programmers
> updating (not rewriting) their parsers to support blueberry is a small
> price to pay for the uncountable who will benefit from it in the future

But that seriously underestimates the cost. It may only take one
Microsoft programmer an afternoon to update MSXML (and even if not, MS
could afford the develpoment cost) but the real cost is the lost time
and confusion caused when newly created conforming blueberry files get
distributed to the millions of installed systems and die with fatal non
well formed errors, without any helpful warning to the end user that an
update to the system would fix the problem. I mention MS but the same is
true of all systems.

That's not to say it shouldn't be done (I'm on the fence on that:-), but
that it is going to be painful if it is done.

I suspect probably the rules on XML Names should be changed although I'd
rather see a system that permanently relaxed the rules to stop this
happening again rather than a temporary fix for 3.1. (I can't see any
benefit at all in the NEL proposal, for IBM users or anyone else, the
end result of making NEL be white space is that it would be mapped to
#10, in which case that may as well just be in the ebcidic mapping table
and not affect XML at all)

David

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