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

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

All right, all right, I said to myself that I'd stay out of this thread, and
I've already broken that.  I think there should be one main consideration.
People are going to use their editor programs to write markup, and they
won't want any characters they can type to be excluded.  Who would be able
to remember the exclusion rules for thousands and tens of thousands of
characters?  But don't try to tell me I have to use a special XML-only
editor to type markup, one that does know these rules.  That's a
non-starter, I would think.

To me, then, the question reduces to just this:  will these characters show
up as printable characters in anyone's everyday, normal text editor-like
application? I don't think people will want to write markup that is very
difficult, with special procedures to insert the characters.  For Windows
users, just think of using the ALT-keypad method for a lot of your markup.
But if they can type it in everyday use, it should be legal for markup.  No
problem with keeping the current disallowed non-name characters, I suppose.
They amount to only a few special cases, not all of them even visible.

Conversely, I don't want my EditPlus-generated markup to suddenly be
rejected because of a change in the markup character set.

Conversely again, if XML shouldn't have to change with every extension to
the character set, then freeze it as is.

So, you CJK-obscure-coding unicode experts out there, what's the betting on
how the characters will get into people's text-producing programs?  WIll
people be typing these new characters into documents with abandon?

Cheers,

Tom P