Re: Blueberry/Unicode/XML

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

It seems like this problem is worth solving, and worth solving in a way
that means we don't have to deal with compatibility issues every few
years.

On 09 Jul 2001 21:33:12 -0700, Tim Bray wrote: 
> Realistically, there are 3 options:
> 
> 1. Leave it the way it is.
> 2. Do Blueberry and then repeat the process for Unicode 3.2
>    and 4.0 and so on every couple of years forever.
> 3. Bite the bullet, write the rules in terms of Unicode
>    metadata and go to a pure use-by-reference architecture,
>    probably adding a syntactic signal to reference the
>    Unicode version number.

I'd add a fourth option [1] that separates the character list for XML
from XML 1.0 itself.  The W3C could still manage the list - declawing
both issues of trust among consortia and further changes to XML 1.0
itself.  Done with a URI, it might also allow developers to take control
of the character list when it's worth the effort to them.

Finally, it would encourage developers to build parsers which rely on
external tables written in a common format.  That would ease a lot of
future interoperability issues and allow developers to use ordinary XML
tools (XSLT, SAX etc.) to convert documents from documents which used
one list of character types to another.

Is it reinventing the SGML declaration?  In a really limited way,
focused squarely on Unicode.  The SGML declaration includes a lot of
items we don't need.

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