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Maybe it's time to trot out the ISO definition of consensus: "the
absence of sustained opposition". Harder to achieve than a majority, of
course, but it may sometimes get better results by forcing the
engagement of two opposing sides until it is achieved.
Hmm, just like the well-formedness constraint! :-)
This is interesting, from Sean McGrath on the diveintomark page:
> Programming languages that barf on a syntax error do so because a partial executable image is a useless thing. A partial document is *not* a useless thing. One of the cool things about XML as a document format is that some of the content can be recovered even in the face of error. Compare this to our binary document friends where a blown byte can render the entire content inaccessible.
I was pondering the other day in this context about the distinction
between text and binary, or more particularly between a markup language
and a file format. Perhaps part of the problem is that Rec-XML is a
little schizophrenic <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-documents>:
> A data object is an XML document if it is well-formed ...
> A textual object is a well-formed XML document if ...
The draconians know that "well-formed XML document" and "XML document"
are identical: if it's not well-formed, it's not XML! The liberals
argue: then why is the superfluous term "well-formed" even used? No-one
talks about a "well-formed JPEG file": it's either correct or it isn't.
I suspect the reason goes back to the fact that XML comes out of HTML
and SGML, which are markup languages not file formats. In practice
there's no such thing as a "corrupt HTML file"; it's just a question of
how the browser will interpret any given soup. XML tries to impose
file-format type restrictions but expresses them in markup language
terms. I guess if the draconian position only entered the text after the
overall architecture of the document had already been written, that
would be some kind of historical explanation.
Feel free to correct me!
Greg.
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