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

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

Ann Navarro further inquired:

> At 04:02 PM 7/23/2001 -0400, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> >It's trivial. The parser has a boolean flag that says whether or not a
> >Blueberry character has been seen which is initialized to false when the
> >parser starts reading a document. If the parser get to the end of the
> >document, and that flag is still false, it reports a well-formedness
> >error, in whatever way well-formedness errors are normally reported by
the
> >parser.
>
> If you've gone to all the trouble of parsing it, where is there then some
> sort of savings in then throwing it all away and reporting an error?
You've
> already done the majority of the work.

Human engineering. Protect those who don't need to upgrade from those who
are too busy to read the spec and realize that declaring the blueberry will
prevent themselves and consumers of their documents from using old tools.

Although I don't think I agree with Elliotte's suggestion, some of the
currently used parsers are not supported, so it might be desirable to avoid
(as long as possible) creating market pressures for a general upgrade.

> I'm open to being pointed toward examples, but this strikes me as a very
> odd way of dealing with versioning, simply to avoid letting a member of a
> sub-set use the superset designation.

From my POV, blueberry is a superset, but it reveals that version levels are
not one-dimensional. I am currently thinking we want to be able to
separately specify XML version number, text encoding, and UNICODE reference
version. But the real solution wants a character set without (gasp) closure.

My two cents from the side.

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