RE: Just a Little Explanaton for Veering (RE: Blueberry/Unicode/ XML)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 12 Jul 2001 17:14:07 -0700, Don Park wrote:
> I beg to differ.  XML is popular in China/Korea/Japan because they are
> already familiar with HTML and of all the hoopla we are making in the
> Western Hemisphere over it as the next Holy Grail.  They have tinkered with
> Chinese-enabled Forth and
> other languages, but they have accepted limitations of C, Java, and Perl
> without any significant complaint.  I haven't heard anyone complaining why
> the new C# identifiers can't be Chinese.  Why is it such an issue in XML
> names?

Maybe it's just that there's a general expectation that markup should
not require the same level of skill or training that working in C, Java,
or Perl does.

HTML was English-based and ugly, but it was a relatively tiny,
constrained, and abbreviated vocabulary.  Unlike HTML (or programming
languages), XML has the potential to go anywhere semantically, so I
can't see any good reason to constrain it linguistically.