[jdom-interest] XMLOutputter and newlinesafterdeclaration/doctype

[Vadim.Strizhevsky at morganstanley.com]

I'm officially designating Eric as my PR person. ;)

He said below what I want to say but much clearer and less
controvertially than I could. Thanks Eric!

-Vadim

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Eric Rosenberg wrote:

> If it doesn't matter then why are you so opposed to the newlines not
> being there? Why is it an invalid use of JDOM to use it to build an xml
> document and return it, and to also dump the message to a log file?
> Obviously, the log file isn't a valid xml document, nor should it be.
> That doesn't mean that someone wouldn't want to be able process that log
> file in some way with a script.
>
> I do this all the time. I have a servlet that uses JDOM to procuce XML
> that is returned to the client. I also dump the xml to tomcat's log file
> so that I can see what is being produced. How's that an inapropriate use
> of JDOM?
>
> You say that there is a lot of things that XML Outputter produces that
> you can't control. But are there other cases where XML Outputter says it
> does something, but actually only sorta does that thing with some
> exceptions?
>
>
>
> Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> > At 2:57 PM -0500 12/19/02, Vadim Strizhevsky wrote:
> >
> >> Well that's the root of the disagreement really. I say it does matter,
> >> you say it doesn't.
> >
> >
> > No, you say it does matter; the XML specification says it doesn't
> > matter. This only matters to you because you're not using XML tools to
> > process your data.
> >
> >> All I was asking for was a way to control the space that is outside the
> >> root element. Since the XMLOutputer produces it, it seemed logical to me
> >> for it to have such control over it. And the resulting XML would _still_
> >> be valid xml.
> >
> >
> > There are a lot of other things XML Outputter produces but doesn't let
> > you control: the white space inside tags, the quotes around attribute
> > values, exactly how characters outside the current character set are
> > escaped, and more.
> >
> > What unifies all of these is that in an XML process, none of it
> > matters. If you're processing XML, the parser isn't even going to tell
> > you about this stuff. If a process needs to know this stuff, then that
> > process is broken. Any way JDOM solves these issues is acceptable. Any
> > added complexity to allow such things to be controlled is not
> > beneficial and actively harmful because it teaches people the wrong
> > lessons about XML.
> >
> > I see a lot of developers who cause themselves a lot of grief by not
> > understanding the difference between syntax sugar and the document's
> > genuine data. In effect, you're asking us to make it easier for you to
> > do the wrong thing. We won't do that. JDOM should make the right
> > solution easy and the wrong solutions difficult to impossible.
>
>
>
>
>