Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 10:43 AM -0400 7/10/01, Simon "St.Laurent" wrote:

>We've seen Murata Makoto explain some circumstances in Japanese which
>make modification of XML 1.0 seem like a very good idea for a large
>number of people. [1]  I honestly can't understand why you seem to
>insist that the costs are too high unless we can magically produce
>additional people working in markup from places which are rather
>unlikely at this point to have ready access to xml-dev or a current high
>priority on markup.
>

That argument was very unconvincing. He explained why the Japanese support XML already has is quite important to Japanese users. But we already have that. Nobody's arguing that we take it out. He said that Microsoft should improve its tools to better support XML 1.0. Lord knows I agree with that.

He indicated one character from Unicode 2.0 and earlier that would clearly be useful to Japanese users as a name character, the Katakana middle dot. I've wondered before why that one got left out of name characters in XML. It's worth fixing if we do revise XML, but by itself it doesn't seem important enough to justify revising XML. Nothing he said was relevant to the question of whether the additional characters in Unicode 3.1 are necessary for Japanese users. 

Tim Bray attributed me with saying that "changing XML is unthinkable". That's not my position. It is thinkable, but before we do it, I want it shown conclusively that change is needed. So far that proof is sorely lacking. 
-- 

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