Re: [Setup-tool-hackers] Report code.

[Arturo Espinosa Aldama <arturo ximian com>]

On 15 Aug 2001, Joakim Ziegler wrote:

> On 14 Aug 2001 22:40:24 -0400, Arturo Espinosa Aldama wrote:
> > 
> > This may be of some use to Diego Delgado and Joakim. I'm writing this as I
> > wait for Israel to do some face lifting on the internet sharing frontend
> > code. I'll put it in backend/doc/protocol.
> > 
> > Well, it turned out so big that I decided to just put it on CVS and not
> > post such a beast to the mailing list.
> > 
> > You can also check the document through:
> 
> Looks good. I have a question, though:
> 
> What's the reason for the <!-- XST: end of request --> magic string? It
> seems to me to be a bad idea because magic comments embed out-of-band
> information that is not aprt of the XML itself, and thus somewhat
> bastardizes the standard. Secondly, it seems unnecessary since the end
> of the  top-level element (which, in a DTD-less XML document is defined
> as the first element, in this case for instance <internetsharing>) also
> *must* signify the end of the document. It's simply not conformant XML
> to have more data after closing the top-level element (other than
> comments).

I'm not sure, but I think it is possible to have several (and
different) top-level tags in an XML file, although this is not very
usual. But I may be wrong: I would have to check in a book or find an
authoritative example.

Yet, the end of request string is a comment, so it doesn't have a problem
with that.

I agree it is hacky, and the only limitations not to do it as you say is
an implementation problem: we need to stop reading all the XML into a
memory buffer before passing it to libXML (at frontende level), and we
probably need to modify the XML scanner in the backend to be a little bit
smarter. 

The only problem I see with using the end of the top tag as the end of the
XML is that we're not going to like XML files that have comments at the
end (emacs likes to do this). But I don't think it is a really bad
restriction.

So I'll keep it in mind and work on it later. The current system works, so
we can go on with the present hacky way, and do it the right way
later: the change will be transparent to users and programmers.

Greetings,
Arturo



_______________________________________________
setup-tool-hackers maillist  -  setup-tool-hackers@ximian.com
http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/setup-tool-hackers