Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

 > 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.

I say, and you have implicitly conceded, that *need* is an
inappropriate standard: nobody (or almost nobody) *needs* more than
Latin, or indeed ASCII.  It's what people *want* that counts.

It may be that people who wanted their native scripts encoded in
Unicode (if they hadn't, Unicode surely wouldn't have encoded
them) may in fact not want to use those scripts in native-language
markup.  But the burden of persuasion for such an extraordinary claim
is on the claimant.

-- 
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