Re: hallucinatory blueberry decoupling

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

I'm forwarding this to www-xml-blueberry-comments@w3.org.
It's a fascinating idea, and may catch on, though personally I
think it involves too much rewriting of parsers.

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> The Blueberry issues seem to have exposed a fault line in XML, where the
> XML plate and the Unicode plate rub up against each other and sometimes
> shift violently.  Blueberry seems like an effort to address the movement
> of these plate, but I'm not sure that the proposals made thus far really
> address the underlying issues of the two separate and separately-managed
> specifications.
> 
> I'm wondering if binding the character class lists into XML 1.0 was a
> mistake.  I'm also wondering if there's an option that would allow
> documents to use URIs to point to character class lists which are
> appropriate to their needs.  
> 
> Parsers would have the responsibility of loading and caching these
> documents as required to process documents. (The default value would
> reflect XML 1.0 behavior.) XML 1.0 parsers would trip over the
> declaration and raise an error, keeping these non-XML 1.0 documents out
> of the way of such parsers.
> 
> Ideally, this approach would permit a RDDL-like decoupling of document
> and metadata, though in this case the metadata would be rather
> fundamental information.  In some ways this reinvents the SGML
> Declaration, but I fear that we're well past that already.
> 
> There are some potentially bizarre results, if developers took it on
> themselves to build funhouse lists where digits were letters and
> combining characters digits etc., but I don't think the odds of that are
> too substantial.
> 
> Simon St.Laurent
> http://www.simonstl.com
> 
> 
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There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
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to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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