Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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What’s in a Public Identifier

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It looks like Apple didn’t just change their registered name or whatever last year, they also made an effort to copy that change over to as many places as possible. For example to the header of XML format property list files. Old ones will read like this:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

while current ones read like this:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

It doesn’t look like this difference is of any practical relevance as both the old and new style properly lists work just fine on my Mac. But seeing the difference made me wonder whether it’s like this ‘by design’ or because Apple parse the files sloppily. If what’s up there in XML files really serves as an identifier, it shouldn’t change or Apple would have to ‘register’ the same format under two names. Which’d seem a bit sloppy.

Would a strict parser bark on this? Unfortunately I couldn’t find a clear answer to that question with a bit of googling. As far as I understand the space between the first ‘//’ and the second ‘//’ is used for the name of the format’s owner. Is that the current owner or rather the owner at the time the format was specified?

On the upside: 9 bytes saved per file! OMG! LOL!

May 11, 2008, 18:59

Tagged as Mac OS X.

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