Re: [apps-discuss] An XML RFC primer?

On St, 2011-01-12 at 10:19 +0100, t.petch wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>
> To: "t.petch" <ietfc@btconnect.com>
> Cc: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <msk@cloudmark.com>; <apps-discuss@ietf.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 8:46 PM
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 9:08 AM, t.petch <ietfc@btconnect.com> wrote:
> 
> > Netconf did take advice from the XML Directorate, and they were plain wrong,
> in
> > one key regard, which has turned out to be an issue that has taken years so
> far,
> > and as yet is unresolved (the question they failed to answer correctly was
> what
> > is and is not valid XML? the consequence is an inability to parse XML
> documents
> > transported by Netconf as currently specified).
> 
> Huh?  Formally, "valid" means "has a DTD and conforms to it" but
> almost nobody uses DTDs any more.  Whether something is or is not XML
> is not in any doubt either de jure or de facto, we have good
> interoperability among parsers these days.  If Netconf XML can't be
> parsed, the specification must have some awful problems.
> 
> I've certainly seen some lousy XML-based protocols here and there, but
> this the first instance of "inability to parse" I've run across.
> 
> <tp>
> I was not clear enough.  It is the ability to parse the Netconf
> datastream into XML documents that is the problem with
> Netconf as currently specified, and which has caused much
> grief for several years.  As Lada has said, there is an I-D
> which is likely to fix this (but whose progress is tortuous).

Simply put, somebody was able to convince the WG that the string
"]]>]]>" cannot appear ANYWHERE in a valid XML document, so this string
was used as the end-of-message marker. It was not technically difficult
to fix this blunder, the biggest problem was backward compatibility with
devices that already use the broken framing.

Lada

> 
> Tom Petch
> 
> </tp>
> 
>  -Tim
> 
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Ladislav Lhotka, CESNET
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