Re: XML Blueberry (non-ASCII name characters in Japan)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 09 Jul 2001 12:52:23 -0400, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> Not necessarily. The rock hasn't moved. It's grown. That's a very different thing. 

In either event, the house on top of it needs to change or risk
structural problems, grumpy householders, declining property values,
etc.

> XML is built on Unicode 2.0 with explicit consideration of how future variations in 
> Unicode will change it. The decision built into the XML spec was to allow all possible 
> Unicode characters that might ever be defined to be used in Unicode documents as text.
> A decision was also made not to forbid undefined Unicode characters in text. This 
> allows Unicode to grow (not move) quite dramatically without affecting XML.
>
> A different decision was made for name characters. There it was decided that these
> would be based on Unicode 2.0, and that code points which might be 
> assigned in the future would not be allowed as name characters. I'm 
> not sure that decision was right, but I don't think a convincing 
> argument for revisiting it now has been made yet. 
> 
> Perhaps the most important decision made in XML 1.0 relative to all this was to 
> explicitly list which characters would be allowed where in the BNF 
> grammar rather than normatively referencing various Unicode character 
> classes. In essence, XML 1.0 copies Unicode with some modifications 
> rather than building on top of it. Even if Unicode did something as
> radical as shuffling the code points for the different characters, 
> that wouldn't mean that XML had to change. 

That's not the history as I've heard it told, but the history is locked
up and out of public discussion.  I'd suggest that you're reading too
much into the particular choices that were made differentiating name
characters and mere content and the choice to pass-by-value rather than
pass-by-reference.

I'm much more comfortable with pass-by-reference in this case, and I've
suggested previously [1] that providing a clean mechanism for such
reference might be a better idea than updating XML every time Unicode
updates or refusing to update XML.

[1] - http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200106/msg00714.html

Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com