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   Re: [xml-dev] Some comments on the 1.1 draft

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>>The problem is that XML is *text*. It is made from *characters*, and
>>arbitrary binary strings have no place in it. Once you change that, you
>>have essentially ruined XML as a textual markup language.
>>
> 
> This argument seems to apply equally against Base64 encoding as it does
> against control characters.


No, since a binary content encoded as Base64 is a text.


> 
> I think of XML not as a textual markup language, but rather as a layer over
> which markup languages can be defined.  Why is it the job of XML to prevent
> characters that are not appropriate for some classes of markup languages?


IMO, it's not a matter of "preventing characters that are not appropriate 

for some classes of markup languages", it's a matter of using the abstract

notion of characters defined by Unicode instead of using their physical 
representation (bytes).

The rec is pretty clear on this point:

"Parsed data is made up of characters, some of which form character 
data, and some of which form markup." and also "[Definition: A parsed 
entity contains text, a sequence of characters, which may represent 
markup or character data.] [Definition: A character is an atomic unit of 
text as specified by ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO/IEC 10646] (see also [ISO/IEC 
10646-2000]).
"


Eric

-- 
Rendez-vous a Paris pour les Electronic Business Days 2002.
                                   http://www.edifrance.org/ebd/index.htm
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org      http://4xt.org           http://examplotron.org
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