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

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>]

I'm afraid I'm not seeing the big interoperability problem here.  At the 
dumb computer level all these characters are just patterns of bits.  It's 
only us smart users that give these bit patterns the semantics to be able to 
tell a letter from a number etc.

It seems to me that a tag (or more specifically at the interop level, the 
bit pattern for a tag) is either one you want, or one you don't.  If you 
don't want a tag, I can't see why receiving a tag containing HEXAGRAM FOR 
THE MARRYING MAIDEN is any more of a problem than receiving a tag with 
'hkyt87sa'.

Surely one of the big stories of XML is that it is fully internationalized. 
Saying XML is mostly internationalized doesn't sound so good and makes it 
sound flaky and dated.

And I agree with John Cowan's blog that morally these additional languages 
should be supported [1].

Norm Walsh's blog mentioned that Cherokee was one of the newly supported 
languages [2].  If Cherokee was my preferred language and I wanted to write 
tags in Cherokee then sure, I would not get ubiquitous interoperability 
immediately.  But then again, chances are that an XML language defined using 
Cherokee is not going to have a huge global impact and it would be 
reasonably easy to ensure that all systems that used this language use XML 
edition 5.  (They could even update their own versions of Xerces and/or 
libxml.  I can't imagine that it would be that hard to do.)

So the Cherokee and other language speakers have to be a bit patient while 
the changes flush through the system before they can assume that the 
Cherokee XML languages will interoperate smoothly.  However, I think that is 
a better situation than the W3C dictating that all those language speakers 
will never be able to use their preferred language.

Regards,

Pete

[1] 
http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2008/02/which-characters-are-excluded-in-xml.html
[2] http://norman.walsh.name/2008/02/07/xml105e

--
Pete Cordell
Codalogic
Visit http://www.codalogic.com/lmx/ for XML C++ data binding
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
To: <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
Cc: "'XML Developers List'" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 12:19 AM
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?


>> The set is large but finite.
>
> No, it's infinite. With ideographic languages, you can make up new symbols
> just as cheerfully as Western languages make up new words. And we're
> increasingly using ideographic languages in the West too - take a look at
> the typical instruction leaflet for installing a washing machine. Most of
> the characters it uses, like the one that says don't put your fingers in 
> the
> electrical socket, aren't in Unicode, but at the rate we're going they 
> soon
> will be. If we can have 2399;PRINT SCREEN SYMBOL then we can have 
> anything.
>
> I thought I'd take a look at 4DF5;HEXAGRAM FOR THE MARRYING MAIDEN
>
> but it's very disappointing...
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
>
>
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