Re: XML Blueberry

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Peter Flynn wrote:


> I see no justification for making a change to line-ends merely
> to accommodate legacy operating systems.


Those "legacy" systems contain a huge amount of well-maintained
data, as someone else (Tim Bray?) pointed out.  Anyway, the
only systems that are not "legacy" are the ones still being
designed: Fred Brooks told us 25+ years ago that an implemented
system is an obsolete system.

> The time to speak up
> on this was four years ago.


A fine attitude to bug-fixing, indeed.

> If IBM is unwilling to bring its
> own systems into the 21st century, it cannot expect the rest of
> the world to repunch their cards for them.


This is sheer prejudice, based on obsolete stereotypes.


> Can someone explain why the problems of accommodating the
> enlarged set of code points in U3.x cannot be solved by moving
> the fence in the SGML Declaration for XML?


That declaration is not normative.

> A Technical
> Corrigendum to the 1.0 Spec could make clear that we should have
> worded it so that the permitted characters of XML are those
> non-control characters defined in Ux.y at any point in time
> (modulo whatever explicit exclusions).


The reason for introducing a new version of XML (or a new
mark of some sort, anyhow) is to protect old parsers.  Allowing
NEL and the Unicode 3.1 name characters changes the definition
of what is a well-formed entity, thus going beyond what an
erratum can fix.

> Or is there something worse going on here?


No.



-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein