On May 6, 2005, at 3:45 PM, Chris Burdess wrote:
> XML *is* the syntax. The API is something else - DOM, for instance.
That's what I was saying.
> If people want to preserve the original stream of bytes, they can do
> so by preserving the original stream of bytes. No XML processor is
> required to report things like whitespace in tags, whitespace in the
> prolog or following the root element closing tag, the UTF-16 byte
> order mark, whether attributes are delimited by apostrophes or quotes,
> whether ampersands are encoded as & or & or &. All of
> these issues have been discussed to death in XML Canonicalization.
Same point...
> Not at all. The spec says the order of attributes is not significant.
> Whether one processor or another chooses to believe that it is
> significant is irrelevant. Building an expectation of such behaviour
> will simply leave your users confused and unhappy when they start
> using another, conformant XML processor without that behaviour and
> their application is broken.
If you define what a conformant XML processor *is*, I might agree with
you. If I have a processor that understand the grammar of well-formed
XML, but emits a boolean value (parsed or not), is that a conformant
processor?
The point is that the processing is domain-specific, and hence, so are
the processors... different requirements force different notions of
"conformant"...
