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7/24/2002 7:50:41 AM, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
>I think the number of cases in which you
>don't know in advance whether or not you will or will not be using
>Burmese/Cambodian/Amharic or, God help us, NEL, in the markup
>somewhere, are vanishingly small.
You are obviously not a middleware developer :~) Not everyone
who has to package up some random XML and slap an envelope and declaration
on it has detailed knowledge of its contents. Sure there are solutions,
but they are generally not something you want to hassle with in the
few milliseconds you have available. And throwing a message on the
floor because it isn't EXACTLY what it claims it is is generally
not appreciated by either party at the endpoints of a message.
We should probably just agree to disagree on this and move the
discussion to some forum where the W3C and its members who will
vote on the matter can see it. Still, my humble opinion is
that the whole point of XML is to be language neutral, vendor
neutral, platform neutral, etc. The tendency of the
W3C has been to take this seriously rather than to say
"currently popular languages, vendors,
and platforms are more neutral than others."
Also, they seem to want to delegate as much of the job of figuring
out what is a character, what is a delimiter, etc. to
the Unicode folks. As anyone who has participated in the
W3C and gotten an instant education in the complexities of
these issues by the I18N (and web accessibility initiative
folks, on somewhat similar topics) can attest, Cost/Benefit
Ratios for existing users do not seem to be part of the
decision criteria. The issue seems to be "will we all be
better off in 5-10 years by rationalizing the relationship
between Unicode and XML" rather than "will current XML
adopters show any tangible benefit in return for the
inconvenience.
While I personally think that the XML 1.1 changes should be
held for a (hypothetical) 2.0 that REALLY cleans house,
I do appreciate the fact that SOMEONE in this wretched world
thinks more than one quarter ahead.
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