> The issue is not IBM databases and never has been. The issue is that
> IBM has some brain damaged text editors that insert a #x85 every time
> you hit the return key instead of inserting a #xA or #xD or both.
> Files created with these editors are not well-formed XML without an
> additional conversion pass. Similarly, IBM has some programming
> languages and tools that generate a #x85 when they do a println() or
> that language's equivalent. That's all.
This isn't brain-damaged, it's just based on a different conceptual model.
Mainframes (not only IBM) generally store files as a sequence of records,
where a record is any sequence of bytes: any bytes. Such a file cannot be
readily translated into a UNIX-style file that is a simple sequence of bytes
without losing the record boundaries. It's therefore entirely natural that a
text editor in such an environment should represent a record boundary in a
way that is different from a byte that can appear within a record.
The fact that most of the world adopted the UNIX-style file model rather
than the mainframe style is a historical accident that doesn't make either
style wrong, let alone "brain-dead". I don't know whether it's right now
that XML should make accommodations for this minority of the IT community,
but it's certainly a reasonable proposition to argue.
Mike Kay
