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

[Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 10:00:45AM +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> Ten years ago, or five years ago, or last year, the W3C Core WG should 
> have said:
>  * An XML processor should not attempt to process a document with a 
> higher major version number but report an error.
>  * An XML processor should attempt to process a document with a higher 
> version minor version than the XML processor was designed for; In such a 
> case, well-formedness error reports should note that the error may be 
> due to changes in the minor XML version (parsers should note which minor 
> version they are using when reporting that a document is well-formed.)

10 years ago that's more or less what was said; 5 years ago (I think, I
forget exactly) the decision was reversed in a mistake that's one of
the biggest reasons that XML 1.1 failed.

> 2) A coarse-grain sieve for fatal reportable name character errors
>     * Strict and detailed rules for Unicode < U+0100
>     * For U+0100 to U+FFFF include or exclude characters based on 
> allowing or disallowing blocks (7bit ranges) which allows very efficient 
> name checking with a 512 entry table and a mask. (This is perhaps more 
> coarse-grain than even the 5th Edition!)
>     * For characters not in the BMP (or surrogates) either allow or 
> disallow indiscriminately all in names

that's close to what 5th edition proposes.
> 
>  3) A fine-grain sieve for non-fatal optionally-reportable name 
> character errors:
>    These are the detailed rules.

If it's not fatal and you don't have to report it, it's not an error.

> 4) Deprecate C1 controls
I pushed hard for this in XML 1.1 and it's one of the reasons that
XML 1.1 failed.  It meant that there were XML 1.0 documents that
were not well-formed XML 1.1 docuemnts, and for some people that's
a killer.  Or it was presented to me as a show-stopper at least.

Liam

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