RE: [xml-dev] Debating "civil disobedience" against overlycomplicatedspecs

[Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

[Michael Champion]
>The other approach would be to lobby the W3C for a clean way to define XML
>feature profiles that applications could use to specify the contract between
>producers and consumers of data -- not just the elements, attributes, and
>values, but the other stuff such as acceptability of DTD internal subsets,
>CDATA sections, PIs, and various namespace declaration configurations. This
>would make the SOAP debate easy to resolve:  just use whatever magic profile
>string is required to tell the XML parser to treat DOCTYPE declarations and
>PIs as errors, then we have interoperability across SOAP implementations and
>between SOAP and generic XML implementations.

I had a shot at this nearly two years ago now with XFM
(XML Features Manifest)
(http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0002.html).

I'd love to see something done on these lines but I sense there are
still too few people willing to talk about their interoperability problems
in public. Maybe someday when the interoperability emperor
sheds a few more clothes.

My current favourite is the amount of XML I see flowing around
the place with encoding="utf-8" in its XML declaration, even though
the systems working with the data choke on anything other than
seven bit or ISO Latin 1 characters.

Doesn't anyone else out there have a requirement
to be able to say "I am using UTF-8 but I promise you, I am only
using Latin 1" or "only using Japanese" etc?

Sean