Re: Well-formed Blueberry

[Joel Rees <rees@server.mediafusion.co.jp>]

Benjamin Franz explained:

> 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)_.

Thanks. I guess the heat got to me.

Here's what I should have said:

Assuming (1) the XML 1.0 character tables are true subsets of the Blueberry
tables,
and hoping (2) an XML 1.0 valid document is valid Blueberry document,
and given (3) the end user doesn't care whether a document is valid under
Blueberry or under XML 1.0,

(4.a) Is it really going to hurt anything if the end-user's parser doesn't
complain that a document labeled XML 1.0 has a Blueberry character in a
name?

Answer: Some users will care. Some will care very much because they've been
given a document that has been validated and their parsers are not blueberry
compliant. Some will be surprised at error messages.

So, (4a.1) Is this going to require warning level switches such as provided
by compilers?

But this is the question I meant to ask:
(4b) What exactly will it hurt if a document that is valid under XML 1.0
labels itself as Blueberry?

Answer: It won't really hurt anything, except that it will prevent
down-level parsers in a communication chain from accepting a document it
would otherwise accept, causing needless logjams.

And now I can see why Elliotte would want to make everyone aware of the
boundary by requiring documents that don't contain blueberry to label
themselves XML 1.0. I don't agree in principle, but I can see that there
would be a necessity in some environments.

So, maybe we need to add an option to the switch I suggested above?
-blueberry=[ 'silent' | 'warnDown' | 'warnUp' | 'rejectDown' | 'rejectUp' ]

blecchh.

Then, after a blueberry aware application edits a document, it must scan the
results to calculate which it should be labeled.

icchh. Acchhkk. Hackkk. iiiiiiyada!

There is another option, and that is to require all vendors to open their
source code, or to at least open their parsers and provide a way for
customers to link in the recompiled parser in the field. I don't like this
idea either. Microsoft will use it as an excuse to really push COM.

But burying our collective heads in the sand is not the answer either.
Blueberry makes it obvious that version control of some sort is necessary.
Perhaps a version control mechanism is a higher priority than Blueberry.

Joel Rees
programmer -- rees@mediafusion.co.jp
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