Re: draft-freed-sieve-in-xml status?

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

Ned Freed writes:
>> Ned Freed writes:
>> > The other issue here is how to map this stuff to regular Sieve. The
>> > stylesheet given in the appendix maps displaydata and displayblock
>> > material into structured comments. This can easily be
>> > extended/changed to cover the handling of material in other
>> > namespaces. But do we want to formalize the structured comment
>> > convention?
>>
>> My desire for structured comments is vanishingly small. My two cents.
>
> I don't think we have a choice. The problem is the XML representation 
> is richer and since it isn't intended as a storage format there  has 
> to be a way to map the additional information to something in regular 
> sieve. Unless we want to do something along the lines of the meta 
> extension Kjetil proposed - which I don't think we want to do, pretty 
> much the only place for it is in comments.

I didn't reply... but at least I would have preferred such a meta thingy 
at 302 time. Now it may be too late.

> I apologize for not being clearer here - I made this sound like it's a 
> processor quality thing, which it isn't.

You were clear enough for me at least.

> The problem is more fundamental: In XML comments are not considered to 
> be part of the infoset. This means conforming XML processors are 
> explicitly allowed to drop them. Which in turn means you cannot count 
> on them being available for processing.

Sure. The question is whether that's a problem.

If you write a script in xmlsieve, convert it and then convert it back, 
then any comments you added may have been deleted. AFAICT this is not a 
problem.

If you write it in plain old sieve, convert it and then convert it back, 
then comments are preserved due to <comment>. AFAICT this is neat, but 
it's not clear to me that it's necessary. (Btw. Now that I think about 
it. Is whitespace preserved in arguments?)

>> I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. So many of these things are just 
>> better than some even worse alternative.
>
> Yeah, that's the nature of the beast, I'm afraid.

Yes.

Arnt