Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

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

At 2:28 PM +0900 7/11/01, Joel Rees wrote:

>This may not be a good admission to make, but I look around the office and I
>see fifteen or so Japanese programmers working with XML, but writing the
>documents, tags and all, in (shift-)JIS encoded text and not worrying too
>much about the consequences. (We are using appropriate declarations.)
>
>If I understand what Mr. Murata says, we are probably already regularly
>using some characters that are supposed to map to code-points in the
>extension plane.
>

If this is in fact happening, then you should be able to prove it fairly easily. Simply show the documents these Japanese programmers have created in the course of their normal work that use these characters in XML names. In fact, I very much doubt you can do that because if they had been using these characters, then the documents would have failed completely in the current generation of parsers.

So this opens up a variant question: did these programmers write documents that failed completely for this reason and have to fix them? If they have done so, how often did it occur? How painful was it to fix? If they have in fact not written any such documents by accident, then that would suggest that the new characters are not so important for Japanese native markup. Let's try and replace all this speculation with some actual data. 
-- 

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| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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