MPEG asks for MIME review for the MPEG21 file format

[C. M. Sperberg-McQueen]

On 18 May 2007, at 13:07 , Martin Duerst wrote:
>
> At 14:54 07/05/18, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> ...
>> You wouldn't be able to still parse the retrieved resource in that  
>> case
>> with a generic XML parser. Wasn't that the whole idea of +xml?
>
> Well, yes, but the language lawyers argue as follows:
>
> Except for UTF-8 and UTF-16, there is absolutely no guarantee
> that an XML parser accepts any encoding whatsoever. There is
> a lot of XML out there with e.g.
>    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='Shift_JIS'?>
> but no XML parser is required to grok that (although many do).
> So you can view binary XML just as an extremely weird and special
> character encoding. I personally wish it wouldn't be necessary,
> but there are people who claim that it is, for whatever it's worth.

First, I agree with Martin's analysis, or rather with his
resumé of the language lawyers' view.

Second, I wonder: Martin, can you clarify something?  When you
say "I personally wish it wouldn't be necessary", do you mean
"I personally wish that it were proven and accepted that the
socalled 'binary XML' format(s) were unnecessary"?  or do you
mean "I personally wish that the language lawyers would not be
such idiots, and that it were generally accepted that this
particular view of "character encoding", and this particular
use of the XML encoding declaration, is unnecessary, and that
binary XML formats should not need to pretend to be
"character encodings" in the sense of the XML specification?

Michael