Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data design and computing

Michael Kay wrote this regarding whether information about a file should be inside or outside the file:


  *   Inside when viewed at one layer, outside when viewed at a different layer.
  *   Or to put it another way, you don't need to know. You don't care whether the bits you get to see are contiguous on disk or not.

I need a concrete example please. Suppose I have a program that can only process XML documents that are encoded using the 8859-8 character set (Latin/Hebrew). An XML document arrives. How will my program determine whether or not it can process the XML document?

/Roger