Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

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

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk> wrote:

> Easy test, how easy would that be to explain to a newbie?
> Surely if you want XML 1.0, use it. The new work should remain new
> and kept that way?

Ease of explanation is one important criterion. Another, perhaps even
more important criterion, is compatibility with existing tools. A big
bang upgrade of all existing parsers, schema validators, XSLT
processors, etc. would be a non-starter. If XML 2.0 can't fit into the
existing tool chain, then there's no reason to make it XML at all. XML
1.1 foundered here, and the only thing it really changed was
version="1.0" to version="1.1". (In hindsight, not requiring parsers
to accept future version of XML was a mistake.)

I can't see that allowing -- in comments is important enough to break
the tool chain. If it were really that important, I'd suggest dropping
comments completely and replacing them with <?comment text ?> but it's
probably simpler to just leave them in as is, imperfect though they
are.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@ibiblio.org