On 18. 5. 25 21:48, Branko Čibej wrote:
XML has the unenviable distinction of being *both* almost unreadable
for humans *and* very finicky to parse for machines.
There's one other nasty problem with XML: it can't represent every
character. There's a test for that, xml_unsafe_author2() in
prop_tests.py and discussion at
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4415
but the really painful par is that our comand-line client is quite happy
to produce invalid XML. Yeah, the /expected output/ in that test case is
invalid XML, heh. I've been thinking about how to solve this; we can't
use &#/xx/; character entities, we can't use <![CDATA[...]]> sections –
both are transparent to invalid XML chars. Of course I'm talking about
our XML output here; we could base64- or quoted-printable-encode values
that are not valid XML, and we wouldn't be breaking any existing use cases.
Well, that's for command-line output. An XML patch format has similar
issues. Any patch format does, but XML is especially nasty in that respect.
I created SVN-4919 to track this in the client and to annotate the test.
-- Brane
