Re: Blueberry/Unicode/XML

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

At 01:58 10-07-2001, Rob Lugt wrote:
>However, I presume there was a good reason why the current name character
>scheme was implemented.  The reasons I can think of are easily dismissed or
>dealt with.  Are there any other more serious implications?

The main reason was that SGML had this system of character roles, and for 
the purposes of the SGML declaration for XML, it was necessary to enumerate 
which characters filled which roles.

It's easy now to dismiss it, but compatibility with SGML was, at the time, 
of critical importance to getting XML off the ground with existing, 
widely-deployed (relatively speaking) software.

The only possible problem I see with this proposal is that combining 
characters would probably need to be forbidden as name-start characters, or 
at least strongly deprecated, otherwise a normalizer could turn markup into 
content.  (This risk already exists, actually; if a greater-than that ends 
a tag is followed by a combining solidus in content, a normalizer could 
turn that into not-greater-than, which would destroy the well-formedness of 
the document.  But the risk should be noted.)

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden, XML Consultant
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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