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On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:50:19 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len)
<clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:
> The rest of what you are saying is more of the same: fear of the wild.
> That is, if we don't make an official subset, subsets will grow willy-
> nilly.
Well, yeah. More or less. See below.
>
> So? Are we here to protect a "brand name" or to ensure that XML 1.0,
> 1.1, are inclusive?
I guess I'm suggesting that XML not go the way of SQL, which (AFAIK from
the very interesting XML databases town hall at XML 2002) seemed to value
inclusiveness at the expense of coherence and interoperability. It's much
easier to add features to a "standard" knowing that they won't be
universally implemented than to refactor out the core stuff that really is
universal from the peripheral stuff that is quasi-proprietary (in the case
of SQL) or useful only to specific subgroups (e.g. notations, parameter
entities) or just very problematic in practice (default attribute values
come to mind).
Inclusiveness is politically easy, but saps the real value of
standardization. I want the core stndard to be the intersection of things
that are actually supported and actually work, not the union of all the
things that different people want to use. The intersection of "SOAP
practice" and "Docbook practice" is a subset of "XML 1.x" and I think it
deserves a recognized identity, and some respect :-)
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