perl-unicode

Re: In-Band Information Considered Harmful

1998-10-26 13:52:13
At 03:09 PM 10/26/98 -0500, John Macdonald wrote:
Tim Bray wrote :
|| At 10:03 AM 10/26/98 -0800, Stephen Zander wrote:
|| >Thus to make Perl REx effective, all of the datastream must be
|| >available to the programmer, because only the programmer knows what is
|| >or isn't "essential".  
|| 
|| Exact-a-mundo. -T.

It sounds to me like it is worse than that.  If "all of the
datastream" is not sufficient for the programmer to decide which
markup elements are significant 

I don't want to go all philosophical here, but we really shouldn't
be bandying about terms like "significant" in this way.  Some kinds
of markup have semantics, like HTML and LaTeX and RTF.  Others, like 
XML & SGML, don't.  All XML does is allow you to break a bunch of
text up into parts and give those parts names.  For lots of 
applications, ancillary information (DTD, stylesheet, javabeans,
namespaces) are tremendously useful in figuring out how to process
the parts.  But in the final analysis all you have is named parts,
and perl just needs to find the 80/20 sweet-spot for getting a
lot of flexibility at maximum performance, and make that last
20% of flexibility available for people who have *got* to do
hairy things and accept that it'll slow them down.

Gosh, what a bunch of platitudes. -Tim

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