Please review application/shf+xml

[ben at morrow.me.uk]

At  2pm on 22/10/03 you (Linus Walleij) wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 ben at morrow.me.uk wrote:
>
> Could I write something like:
> 
>  Second, neither the "xml" processing instruction nor the
>  "DOCTYPE" declaration need to be present.

Ah yes, this is quite different. I ws puzzled by 'neither... MAY be
present'.

> (Accordingly, if a
>  character set other than UTF-8 is desired, then the "encoding"
>  parameter must be present in an "xml" processing instruction .)

For this, see Chris Lilley's mail. The paragraph he gives is all that
is required.

> > Two additional points: would it not be worth declaring an XML
> > namespace for this format in addition to the DTD?
> 
> I have seen no standards for this: there are however two drafts
> about it, while we don't know if they will be published, we fashined
> this like e.g.  the BEEP standard.

What about <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names>? OK, that's W3C not
IETF, but they are probably the appropriate standards body wrt XML
stuff. 

This is rather a side issue, and doesn't really matter. :)

> > and would it not be worth adding support for using hashes other
> > than SHA-1,
>
> We had this discussion, and SHA-1 is sort of IETF standard (RFC
> 3174).

Sorry. Fair enough. :)

> > More generally, although this may be out of the remit of this
> > list, is an XML-based format not a little complex for a hex dump?
> 
> The main purpose is transport and storage. In reality, dumps are
> typically not transferred to embedded systems by way of textual
> formats anyway, instead a host program ("flasher" etc) on some other
> machine will typically read the SHF file and transfer the data via
> serial bus in some custom format.

This is not quite my point (although it does clarify that the format
would be useful rather than futile :). Rather, my question is, why are
you using XML rather than (say) some format based on short-lines-of-
ASCII (perhaps taking RFC2822 as your model)? Given that the data to
be represented is pure ascii, and has a very simple structure, do you
really need all the complexities of XML?

Ben