NEL where?

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 12:02 PM 19/07/01 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>David Carlisle wrote:

Pointing out problems with NEL in the XML declaration

>For the Nth time, I am *not* proposing adding NEL/LS to XML white space!
>I am proposing changing what XML understands as a low-level line end.
>This is quite different.

Really?  So you wouldn't add it to the production for "S"?
I.e. you wouldn't be able to have a NEL in the middle of
a tag?  All you're saying is that when it's in the data
stream it should be mapped to \n?  In this case, we have a 
tempest in a teapot.  But I didn't think that's what the
mainframers wanted, they wanted to be able to say

<img src="x.jpg"
     alt="the mighty X" />

and have a NEL between src= and alt=

I thought David Carlisle pointed out a real problem:
if I can have NELs in the middle of my encoding declaration,
it's a substantial increase in the complexity of parsing them
to pull the encoding stream out.  In principle it shouldn't
matter, since an XML processor has to be able to do UTF8 and
UTF16, so it should be able to unpack characters... but it
was a nice characteristic that the XML encoding declaration 
was all characters with values < 128... i.e. you could read
and interpret bytes before you decided to turn on the
UTF-* machinery.  -Tim