Well-formed Blueberry

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 11:35 PM -0400 7/12/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Peter Flynn scripsit:
>
>> Why would there not be any helpful warning message? "The file
>> you have opened contains character "foo" in the [something
>> useful about location] which is not a valid character. Please
>> contact the owner or author"
>
>Actually, it would probably fail on the spot with "XML declaration
>not well-formed" or "XML version number not 1.0" or whatever.


I still haven't been convinced of the need for Blueberry, but I do want to propose something in the event this goes through:

I think there's a way to limit the damage this does to the existing infrastructure. Whatever the eventual identifier is chosen for Blueberry (version="1.1", unicode="3.1", etc.) I think it should be a *fatal error* to use this identifier in a document that does not actually use any of the newly introduced characters in an XML name somewhere. 

In other words, if a document can be an XML 1.0 document, it must be an XML 1.0 document.

This would prevent the vast majority of users who are never going to use or even think about Khmer, Amharic, the extra Japanese characters, etc. from pointlessly generating incompatible documents just because "it's the latest version."
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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