Re: [xml] A few Windows specific issues

[Igor Zlatkovic <igor stud fh-frankfurt de>]

Hi there.

> As far as the users trying win32 file paths with libxml neding
> hand-holding, personally I'm against this. (Hey, I *know* my opinion has
> no weight :]).

Obviously, there is a misunderstanding here. The requirement is: If there is
a command-line utility which accepts a path specification as a parameter,
have it support the path specification conventions of the host operating
system.

This requirement is not without reason. Utilities which are instructed to do
something by passing them parameters should more-or-less support the
oddities of the underlying operating system. Such utilities are very
commonly used in shell scripts and their input can contain things produced
by other utilities.

Supporting path conventions of the host operating system is rather a basic
feature needed for successful cooperation with other utilities, many of
which are perhaps native to that operating system and know no path
specification formats other than the native.

Different platforms have different formats for the same things and the
burden of cross-platform software is to support them all, usually to the
magnitude of converting them to the preferred format.

"Hand-holding Windows users" would be, for example, allowing something like

  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl"
    href="C:\My Documents\My XSL File.Xsl"?>

to appear in a XML document. This would be a clear violation of the standard
and a great step towards unportable XML. This we won't do. If nothing else,
it would be just a matter of time until non-portability produces another
ocean of bug reports.

By the way, if your opinion had no weight, I would not have bothered to type
all this. Every opinion with a trace of reason has a weight. It is just
that, like instances of any entity, some weigh more than the others :-)

Igor