This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: XML 1.1 - the bad and the ugly
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Everything you need to know about XML 1.1 can be summed up in two rules:
Don't use it.
(For experts only) If you speak Mongolian, Yi, Cambodian, Amharic, Dhivehi, Burmese or a very few other languages and you want to write your markup (not your text but your markup) in these languages, then you can set the version attribute of the XML declaration to 1.1. Otherwise, refer to rule 1.
Well, regardless of what people should use, rest assured that they will use 1.1. Now, we don't have a 1.1 parser in VW at this point (we likely will by the next release). In the meantime, after a couple of small hacks, BottomFeeder handles Mark's feed just fine. I've posted the update to the dev stream; I may back it down to the regular stream if I don't see any issues with it
This is one of the really nifty things about using Smalltalk, actually - anyone use Java or .NET, and using the shipping XML libraries, is kind of up the creek - you can't easily make small changes to these libraries, and even subclassing could be problematic (I have no idea if critical classes in these frameworks are declared final, but they could be). Meanwhile, I was able to deal with this in a work-around kind of way in minutes - and I'm no parser expert....
Previous Topic
