Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@ibiblio.org>]

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Pete Cordell <petexmldev@codalogic.com> wrote:
> I added the following comments on Elliotte's proposal (I'm not sure where
> the best place for such a discussion is):

My plan is that people who are interested in this and in basic
agreement with the goals will self-nominate, and then we'll set up a
group somewhere to discuss quietly.

> In the area of entities, the choice of '&' as the escape character seems
> very unfortunate.  It's too late to change this, but I think the character
> sequences '&amp;', '&gt;', '&lt;', '&apos', and '&quot;' should cause the
> replacement they currently do, but any other sequence following an '&'
> character should have no special meaning.  Thus, if you type '& then', your
> parser returns '& then' rather than an error.

That would violate backwards compatibility.

> _Data Structures and Types_
>
> I like the idea of xml:type, but I think it's only required for complex
> types when mirroring the functionality of polymorphism.  It's not required
> for simple types.  If an application doesn't know what an 'X' is, then
> knowing that it is an 'int' is not really going to help it.

The advantage here would be in enabling cleaner APIs. I.e. JSON has
taught us that developers want this.

> I think the XML 2.0 spec should have a 'Compatibility' section in it that
> says if you want your XML 2.0 document to be valid XML 1.0, then take note
> of the following ... .  One of the things it would mention is comments.

That's certainly worth considering. Perhaps there should be two
levels? a basic level with no XML declaration that is XML 1.0
compatible, and a level with <?xml version='2.0'> that is not?

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@ibiblio.org