Re: XML Blueberry

[Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>]

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On Thursday 21 June 2001 17:21, Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com wrote:
> > From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> > But wait! It's not even that bad. Several of the languages listed are
> > total red herrings.
>
> This is an area that I know even less about, but I have been burned
> repeatedly  by taking the same position as Elliot Rusty Harold does.  As I
> understand it, the principal reason that people care about the characters
> that are not in Unicode 2.0 is that they are widely used in proper names,
> and people (and companies) *care* if they are constrained against using
> their names in electronic communication.  I don't disagree that as a
> practical matter the people affected might well be content with the fact
> that this only affects their ability to define names (of elements and
> attributes) not actual text values.  Nevertheless, as with line endings,
> why not bite the bullet now and make XML Unicode 3.0-friendly and get on
> with life? It's one of those issues that will require more energy to argue
> about than to fix, I suspect.

I agree with Mike here. XML is so defined that it's impossible to change 
anything about it without breaking backwards compat. I understand that the 
utility of writing element names in rare scripts seems marginal, but impose 
such a restriction ? By the time people bump into a document that uses such 
element names they'll have updated their parsers ten times over.

For IBM I have no opinion. It's tempting though to show some other companies 
which I won't name what trouble it can bring them to try to dominate by 
breaking interoperability.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com> -- CTO
k n o w s c a p e : // venture knowledge agency www.knowscape.com
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As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.