> -----Original
Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 12:43 PM
>
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: participating communities (was
XML Blueberry)
>
>
> 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'd make the
analogy of trying to convince Dubya that global warming is real. By the
time the proof is unambiguous, it will be too late.
Failing to modify XML
to fix the various problems with the 1.0 spec that come to light won't cause
mass starvation and put Florida underwater, but it will invite fragmentation and
competition: Someone will "embrace and extend" XML to fix the NEL problem,
someone else will "fix" their parser to handle Unicode 3.1 the way their Asian
customers want to use it, somebody other than the W3C will try to standardize a
different flavor of "SGML for the Web", various big companies will tell their
customers to ignore the failed experiment of markup standards and stick with
their proprietary solutions ... and pretty soon we'll have a situation that
would make the XML 1.0 / 1.1 compatibility problems look trivial by
comparison.