::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Wednesday 06 February 2002 09:21, you wrote:

> XML is standard built on top of ASCII (but it could just as easily have
> chosen ECBDIC had that been the encoding standard du jour) which describes
> a syntax for representing structured information as an ASCII byte stream.

Unicode, not ASCII. Never forget that. An XML processor is a complex piece of 
software since it *must* operate at the Unicode level (even if it's just 
mapping some ASCII variant to Unicode) to be able to process valid XML 
documents, which may contain character references to Unicode, or be encoded 
in UTF-8.

> So I agree that you have to put a stick in the ground and say "We'll use
> ASCII and build on top of that", or even before that, say "We'll use a
> binary encoding system and build on top", but after that you're up and
> running.

Yeah!

> I guess that's the bootstrapping problem.  Once you reach a certain level,
> your documents can becomes self-describing and in a rather contrived sense,
> self-aware.  But you can only get that far by making assumptions set in
> stone about how you're going to build the foundations.

Yeah!

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software