Re: [xml-dev] Is "Hand Authoring" XML still a critical use case ?

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>]

* Michael Sokolov wrote:
>I think a lot of the things we've been talking about are painful for 
>content producers as well as consumers: often our pain gets reflected 
>back up the chain anyway.  I bet editors just love it when we tell them 
>- well we can't do anything with that document you just sent us - it 
>isn't even XML! Just because there's an extra blank line at the 
>beginning of the document

This is a design flaw in the core specification; the automaton that
reads the encoding declaration (or finds that there is none) for all
encodings you could reasonably use with XML is very simple and very
efficient, yet instead of specifying it, we have a requirement that
makes common things very annoying, for instance you cannot copy

  <?xml version='1.0'?>
  <x/>

into a text file and run it through your XML tools, you have to re-
move the leading white space first; and a couple of non-normative
suggestions in the specification how one might, or not, go about
deciding what character encoding a document is using. Among all the
suggestions how to change XML, this is so far the only problem I'd
really like to see fixed.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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