Re: Well-formed Blueberry

[Benjamin Franz <snowhare@nihongo.org>]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Joel Rees wrote:
> 
> jcowan@reutershealth.com clarified:
> >
> > Therefore, Blueberry parsers have to keep both sets of tables.  Luckily,
> > the Blueberry table is a strict superset of the 1.0 table,
> 
> I read "strict superset", and I think that anything that passed the XML 1.0
> parser should pass the Blueberry parser. Is this correct? If it is, why
> should a Blueberry capable parser care if a doc that labels itself XML 1.0
> slips in a blueberry? I missed the posts that explained the specific damage.
> (Or maybe I'm just brain-dead, anyway. It's been a hot, humid summer here.)
> 
> Okay, I can see that developers will want to have the wall available to
> check against when developing for a context in which some users may be
> restricted to XML 1.0. End users won't need the wall, however?

Yes, they do. If a Blueberry parser generates/accepts _badly formed 1.0_
then it will not reliably interoperate with 1.0 parser based systems and
cannot be made to do so. The result will be documents that are generated
by non-technical users using Blueberry based systems that their parser
accepts as XML 1.0 - but which are NOT exchangable with actual XML 1.0
based systems. This is a _Bad Thing (tm)_.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

  Programs must be written for people to read, and only 
  incidentally for machines to execute.
                             ---Abelson and Sussman