xml-dev - Re: ISO 10646 vs. Unicode in XML specs

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

"Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:

> Given the exact correspondence between them, would anything be broken as far
> as you know if all references to ISO 10646 within the XML 1.0 spec were to be
> replaced by references to Unicode?    In other words, is there any technical
> reason at all why ISO 10646 was chosen over Unicode as the defining document
> for character sets,

There can't be, since everything prescribed by 10646, with the narrow exception
of the subset-declaring ESCape sequences, which are not used by XML (or much
of anyone else AFAIK), is also prescribed by Unicode.

> or was it purely a political decision?

"Political" is technically correct, but has the wrong flavor.  As I said,
international standards tend to be more stable than commercial ones, though
in this case there is no such difference.

-- 

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