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

[Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 08:50:38AM -0000, Michael Kay wrote:
> >> 4. Expand the name productions to include characters from Unicode 5, 
> > but still forbid undefined characters, musical symbols and the like. 
> 
> I think it's unfortunate that XML 1.1 and XML 1.05 decided to allow all
> non-ASCII characters in names. I have always dreamed that there would be a
> day when programming languages were able to use symbols like the
> multiplication and division signs with their intended meanings,

The divide sign is not a name start character in XML 1.1, nor in the
proposed 5tyh edition.

Multiply is at D7 and Divide is at F7; in 5th edition I see:
    NameStartChar	   ::=   	":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z] |
	[#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] | [#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D] |
	[#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] |
	[#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] |
	[#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF]

so divide and multiply are not included.

The goal is to allow name characters in names, regardess of whether
they are in the 7-bit US ASCII set of "letter" or the wider set
that people actually use.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/