From: Bjoern Hoehrmann [mailto:derhoermi(_at_)gmx(_dot_)net]
<snip/>
XML only works with 100% standards compliance, xml-dev people will go
and advocate it. Considering the amount of people who complained about
IE accepting invalid characters in XML documents, soon all product
developers and content providers will have their products and content
fixed.
I agree with you, there. I've been pretty outspoken on this particular issue
in the past on this list and others. I think the situation is improving.
More developers are becoming aware of this.
I know, for instance, that at one point virtually none of the SOAP toolkits
on the market were including a charset parameter on the Content-Type header.
But this issue was raised on the Yahoo soapbuilders list, and toolkit
implementors worked together to make sure this issue was addressed, and that
the various toolkits handled character encoding issues in a fashion that is
interoperable and complies with the relevant specs.
So we just need to keep educating people about this, and things will
continue to improve.
I think we also need to learn the lessons from what has happened on the web.
The idea of having forgiving tools sounds great in theory, but it encourages
sloppy practices on the part of developers. It is because of "forgiving"
browsers that we have a web populated with malformed HTML content. We should
try not to repeat that mistake with XML.