Re: Well-formed Blueberry

[Rob Lugt <roblugt@elcel.com>]

From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>

>
> I still haven't been convinced of the need for Blueberry, but I do want to
propose something in the event this goes through:
>
> I think there's a way to limit the damage this does to the existing
infrastructure. Whatever the eventual identifier is chosen for Blueberry
(version="1.1", unicode="3.1", etc.) I think it should be a *fatal error* to
use this identifier in a document that does not actually use any of the
newly introduced characters in an XML name somewhere.
>
> In other words, if a document can be an XML 1.0 document, it must be an
XML 1.0 document.
>

I can see a good reason for doing what you suggest, and I sympathise with
your comments but the fact is that your proposal would turn a trivial
implementation change into something much more difficult.  It could also
have a performance impact, so is unlikely to be popular with Parser
developers.

Wouldn't a better solution be one of education and market forces?  Just like
most people write backwards-compatible HTML today, most people will continue
to write backwards-compatible XML tomorrow for the simple reason that they
want it to be interoperable.

Regards
~Rob