Re: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

Elliotte's proposal seems sound to me.  I'm also not certain about 
XInclude. I wouldn't philosopically insist on point 4, except that if 
this is a subset, expanding the Unicode characters allowed in names 
especially seems like a bad idea.  6 and 7, I could live with either way.

Allowing the DOCTYPE to point at various kinds of external documents is 
the only thing in there that feels actually dangerous to me - I'd expect 
it to point to a DTD if it was present.

I agree, however, that validity doesn't need to be discussed in this at all.

And it might make sense for someone to write up a separate spec for DTDs 
- I understand that they still have a fan club.

Simon St.Laurent
Retired XML troublemaker
http://simonstl.com/


Elliotte Harold wrote:
> For the record, I would support an XML 2.0 that addressed these issues, 
> provided it offered enough benefits to outweigh its costs. The problem 
> with XML 1.1 and XML 1.0.5 are that they benefit *no one* and impose 
> huge costs on everyone. (I still have yet to meet one single actual user 
> who needs XML 1.1.)
> 
> I would suggest a putative XML 2.0 follow roughly Tim Bray's skunkworks 
> proposals. Specifically I'd like to see:
> 
> 1. Combine the namespaces, XML base, and xml:id specs with XML 1.0. 
> (Possibly XInclude, though I'm not sure about that one.)
> 2. Remove the internal DTD subset. Allow the DOCTYPE declaration to 
> point at schemas of various types and move all discussion of validity to 
> separate documents for different schema languages.
> 3. Expand the list of predefined entity references to include what's 
> defined in HTML and MathML.
> 4. Expand the name productions to include characters from Unicode 5, but 
> still forbid undefined characters, musical symbols and the like. That 
> is, follow the patterns of XML 1.0 rather than 1.1.
> 5. Ban the C0 and C1 control characters, except \r, \n, and \t.
> 6. Eliminate CDATA sections
> 7. Eliminate one of the quotes, either single or double, around 
> attribute values.
> 8. Remove attribute value normalization and all attribute types (at 
> least in the base spec)
> 
> I'd be willing to compromise on a lot of this, by the way. I can live 
> ith CDATA sections and single quoted attribute values, even if they make 
> life tougher for parser writers.
> 
> That would be a simplified XML worth supporting. However what XML 1.1 
> gave us and XML 1.0.5 is now proposing is of no value to anyone, and 
> imposes massive costs on everyone. It is a simply bad idea and a bad 
> proposal, even irrespective of the abuse of the errata process.
>