[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> People use mainframes, and XML too. If XML 1.0 had insisted
> that only CR-LF and LF were acceptable line terminators, don't you
> think an argument based on justice for Mac users would have been
> appropriate?
No, supporting Mac-style line terminators does not need to grandized into
an issue of justice (by which John means egalitiarianism, I think*) but
* pragmatism: the number of people typing documents in editors
on Macs is very large
* operational considerations: a programmer generally has control over the
line terminators they use, and mainframes are typically programmed
* XML 1.0 was starting fresh, and therefore only had SGML and RFC
compatability to cope with: XML 1.n must be a trade-off between the
particular benefits and the costs in distruption.
* CR and LF were in play any way, so a decision on how to support CR
alone is necessary even as a matter of error handling
* CR is part of ASCII, and so it is low-hanging fruit to adopt.
* XML had the 80/20 rule, and I am not sure that NEL would
have made it even if it into XML 1.0 in any case.
NEL on the other hand is rare, specialist, non-ASCII, and not low-hanging fruit.
> "It is intolerable to have no better reason for a legal rule than
> that *thus* it was laid down in the time of King Henry the Second."
For some reasons, see above.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
* IMHO It is not injust if W3C were to decide on only ASCII characters in names,
for example. But would be anti-egalitarian, and obviously bad for the market.
|
