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

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

At 1:51 PM -0400 7/20/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Elliotte Rusty Harold scripsit:
>
>> >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.
>
>But will they fit in your PDOC (Portable Device Of Choice)?
>

My PDOC can hold enough memory to work with the documents it needs to work with. I don't expect it to have 512 MB (at least not till next year :-)  but I don't expect it to have to work with multiple megabyte componentized documents either.  (FYI, I also saw an 80 MB Smartcard about a third the size and width of a credit card that somebody was using in a digital camera.)

>> 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. 
>
>Well, I certainly have no problem with this idea.  But do you think
>it would achieve the purposes that you want it to achieve?  Wouldn't
>it become the Received Wisdom that the way to write an XML
>document was something like:
>
>	<?xml version="blueberry" encoding="utf-8"?>
>	<?{insert Deseret char here}?>
>

No, I think that 90%+ of people are never going to need to use Blueberry at all. I think that of the remainder, most of those who are using Blueberry will know they are because all their markup will be written in Khmer or Amharic or Mongolian and so forth. I think it will be a very rare case, mostly limited to some Japanese and Chinese documents (and far from the majority of those), where there may or may not be Blueberry characters. 
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ 
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      | 
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+