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

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Tim Bray responding to a question of mine:

> >Do folk prefer to deal with characters in the astral planes
> >as surrogate pairs (native representation in String and in
> >char arrays), or as decoded "int" values?  Both?  Is some
> >other representation preferred?
> 
> Seems like the smart thing is to leave it in a String
> for now, in the hope that the rest of the Java apparatus
> will get non-BMP-savvy in the course of time, and you'll
> be able to send these things to renderers and other
> string-processing-functions and the Right Thing Will
> Happen.

Except that changes the way programs working with
individual "character" values will work:  they'll have
to convert to array-ish (string, char[]) representations.

Plus, learn that some characters consume multiple
indices ... that starts to touch on display issues, like
combining characters, with similar problems.


> I'm wondering if there is a need for some Blueberry-aware
> SAX2 utility/support interfaces, but nothing comes to mind.

Well, I've always thought a class with static methods
to support various name tests would be valuable, even
in the absense of blueberry issues.  The basics are just
whether a character can be the first or Nth character
of an XML 1.0 name, ignoring namespace issues.  Then
there would be "what version of XML" issues.

- Dave