Subject: Re: CAP / BEEP / XML / iCalendar

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 10:18:56 -0500

>surely just saying the transport protocol layer is BEEP implies the data 
format (and much else).

No, BEEP carries arbitrary MIME messages.  It could carry native 
text/calendar just fine; the current draft doesn't largely because people 
looked at existing BEEP usage and though, "Oh, BEEP means we have to use 
XML".

/=================================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer              |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.         |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.         |
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|Vote for Ron, and nobody gets hurt! --actual campaign poster from|
|Chicago                                                          |
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From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 10:20:23 -0500

>Looking at the OSI
>model

...is rarely useful.  Even OSI eventually had to break the OSI model.

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From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:57:19 -0500

Paul B. Hill wrote:

>I'm OK with the use of beep and the use of XML in the transport protocol.
>
>The limited use of XML that has been introduced will not require a full
>parser to be used by an implementation.

I'm not so sure, actually; although the examples in -07 use only a subset 
of XML, that subset is never specified.  As a result, an implementation 
has to be ready for any legal XML document.  This requires a full XML 
parser--it may not have to be a validating parser, but it does have to be 
able to parse a DTD, since any XML document can include a DTD subset at 
the start, which could include entity definitions that will be needed to 
parse the rest of the document.

Having written both (more than once), I can say that an XML parser is at 
least as complicated as a text/calendar parser.  Sticking to just 
text/calendar (which we have to have anyway) would be a useful 
simplification.

/========================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer     |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.|
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.|
|========================================================|
|Organ transplants are best left to the professionals.   |
\========================================================/