Re: Blueberry is not "closed" (was: Closing Blueberry)

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

At 11:16 PM -0400 7/19/01, John Cowan wrote:

>Well, suppose we have a program whose purpose is to pull XML fragments out
>of various databases and create a consolidated file.  If the program invokes
>the database in asXML mode, the database generates XML all by itself.
>If the program has a streaming design, as it well might, how does it
>know *at the beginning*, where the Blueberry Mark presumably is,
>whether or not to generate it?
>

OK, so it's really just the streaming problem in disguise one more time. 

>The alternative is to use two passes or to buffer up all the output,
>either of which may be prohibitive.
>

I think most of the time it wouldn't be. I went to MacWorld a couple of days ago. 512MB DIMMs were running $159. 80 gigabyte hard drives were $379. Memory and space is cheap, cheap, cheap. 

However, for those few cases where this is prohibitive, there is a workaround. Under my proposal a Blueberry declaration is legal if and only if one or more Blueberry characters is used in an XML name somewhere in the document. Thus adding a single processing instruction whose target contained a Blueberry character either before or after the root element would make the document Blueberry legal. It's a hack, I admit. But it would allow developers who really don't know whether or not they were using Blueberry (a miniscule fraction of the proposed uses, I expect) to include a legal Blueberry declaration. 
-- 

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