[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
I think most people on this list are willing to discuss this issue - that's
why it's a permathread. But no one has been able to achieve any kind of
consensus on what can be safely thrown out.
Some points on this:
1. You say "Lets abolish mixed content." This makes anyone who uses XML for
document markup plotz. Are you saying Docbook, XHTML, and FO are not welcome
in your subset?
2. PIs are usually first against the wall in most people's subsets (see
SOAP). I noticed you see them as useful.
3. Dropping the XML Declaration ( the <?xml ... ?> thingy ) has non-obvious
side effects. This is how you declare the character encoding of your
document. Are you suggesting that all XML documents (in your subset) should
be in either UTF-16 or UTF-8? Will the people you hope to work with accept
this - or have you just alienated most east asians?
4. The few things that everyone pretty much agrees can be dropped, usually
are using the "parse and ignore" method. When was the last time you saw
anyone paying attention to Notations or Attribute declarations (other than
ID & IDREF).
While this discussion will no doubt go on for ages, I have to say I just
don't see the point. If you don't like mixed content, just create grammars
that never use it. If you don't like PIs, don't put them in your document,
and ignore them if you receive a document with them. If external entity
processing scares you, set the switch on your parser to not resolve them.
Generic processing can look at documents as XML, and support all these weird
features. Specific processing can operate on whatever subset you like.
Let a thousand subsets bloom!
-Wayne Steele
>From: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@seairth.com>
>So would the XML community be okay with defining a subset of XML? For
>instance, suppose we defined a formal subset that did not contain DTDs
>(which implicitly also means, id, idref, notations, etc.) or mixed content
>and did not use the <?xml?> PI. Technically both XML and SGML processors
>would understand it, just as SGML understands XML. But such a subset would
>be used in ways that XML wouldn't, just as XML is used in ways that SGML
>isn't.
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
|
