Re: Blueberry/Unicode/XML

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Jonathan Borden scripsit:

> > The main point is that it wouldn't be plain text any more.  If
> > XML is just a
> > binary format, something that no human being ever looks at, then
> > ASCII markup is plenty: you can tag everything x1, x2, x3, ....
> 
> Hmmm... I thought that Unicode _was_ plain text, at least it says that it
> is.

Yes, of course.  I was making an analogy, not speaking literally.

> I am not suggesting that we not represent XML as a sequence of Unicode
> characters, nor am I suggesting that we allow characters in element names
> that are not allowed in text content.

There are no such characters, with the trivial exception of the ASCII
control characters.  Anything else can appear in content, including
codepoints that are not yet defined.

> ... if 127 kinds of stars pose a problem for humans reading element names,
> surely they will pose the same problem for humans reading element content,
> no?

Yes.  But XML parsers don't care about content, by definition.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
	--Douglas Hofstadter