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

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

On 09 Jul 2001 17:28:45 -0400, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> >Are those the criteria for Unicode?  
> 
> Of course not, and those shouldn't be the criteria for inclusion in Unicode 
> because Unicode has totally different needs than XML markup. Unicode is 
> about *TEXT*. We're talking about *MARKUP*. These points keep getting confused.

Actually, they aren't being confused.  We simply have rather different
values.  I want users to be able to do markup in the same language they
use for the text.  Requiring developers to use a different language for
markup than they use for text seems inherently bizarre to me.

> To lose any of these scripts from text, would be a huge disadvantage. 
> It would clearly disenfranchise far more than 10,000 users apiece. It
> would be a radical impoverishment of human culture. But nobody's
> arguing that.

But you seem deeply uninterested in those of us who find limiting the markup 
characters to the existing set to be an "impoverishment of human culture".  That
disenfranchisement does not appear to trouble you.

> It's not the W3C's job to decide what characters should be allowed in text. 
> It's not the Unicode Consortium's job to decide what characters should be 
> allowed in  XML names. 

I think you're understating the degree to which those two things are and should be related.

I'd very much like to see the cost of this transition absorbed early - now - 
and I'd like to make sure that cost is addressed in a way which avoids future debates over the merits of allowing people to perform markup in the same language as the text being marked up.