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

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>]

Pete Cordell wrote:
> 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.

I think most implementers use the Unicode support in their programming 
languages or standard Unicode libraries for parsing Unicode, because 
it's too much work to roll your own. It's odd to tell someone who relies 
on newer versions of Unicode that although the characters of their 
language work fine on their computer and can be displayed in their word 
process, we require XML parsers to check each character to ensure that 
they do not support these characters.

And in my limited testing, XML parsers do seem to support at least some 
of these characters, whether or not they say they do  ;->

It's important to distinguish characters used as operators in languages 
like XPath and XQuery from name characters, but beyond that, it's 
easiest to trust your underlying Unicode implementation.

Jonathan