xml-dev - Re: First draft of proposed XML TC for Unicode 3.0 (unofficial)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

This moving-Unicode-target is a very good issue for this forum, and 
thanks are due to John Cowan for bringing it to our attention.  Things
we could do include:

1. freezing XML 1.0 at Unicode 2
2. updating it per John's suggestion to accommodate Unicode 3
3. putting in a by-reference pointer so that XML and Unicode
   conformance are (to the degree possible) orthogonal.

#3 is the most elegant solution, but it certainly made a majority of
the original XML WG very nervous.  In fact, people (I'm one of them)
*did* use the character tables from the XML spec to construct 
parser tables in their code.  This is a reassuringly deterministic
way to build software, and leads to a very high degree of confidence
that my software and yours will interoperate in a surprise-free way.
Option 3, to my mind, opens a door a lot of interoperability surprises.
IMHO, xml ain't perfect but by golly it has already proven itself
to be *damn* interoperable, let's try to preserve that.

So my leaning would be to a series of widely-spaced and well-publicized
revisions along the lines John proposes, which might be regarded as
tracking Unicode in a controlled way.

But I think the community is certainly open to other suggestions in
this area. -Tim

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