From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 31 2004 - 17:38:15 EST
From: <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> XML has become the de facto standard for fancy text. It is therefore
> useful to explore ways and means of bringing XML into plain text,
> since obviously plain text is simpler than, and superior to, fancy text.
> The current method involving & and < and > and / and who knows what else
> is obviously much too complicated, and cannot interoperate with even the
> simplest plain text. Fortunately, the characters in planes 4 through
> B can come to our rescue.
Is it a joke? XML does not need it, and if something is expected it's possibly a
structured binary representation of XML for easier processing with simplicied
parsers.
Your "proposal" also ignores the current developement of XML with namespaces and
parsed entities resolved according to interchangeable schemas... (these last can
be described in a structured binary representation, by respecting the XML
document InfoSet, but until there's a need and formal definition for use in XML
RPC services, I see no usage for such obscure encoding in planes 4 to 11
(because such encoding is unparsable, notably for document validation and
reusability with non colliding namespaces)... Thanks the current text-based XML
syntax offers much more flexibility than what you propose here, which could lead
to new flaws (probably even more than with the current syntax supported by
existing XML parser implementations), including at the security level (think
about how you would break XML Signatures)...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 31 2004 - 18:15:23 EST