Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

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

My feeling is that since a lot of XML tools are XML-in / XML-out, _any_ 
differences between XML 1.0 and XML 2.0 are going to bite you unless the 
tools are XML 2.0 aware.

I think we need to look at the stake holders in an XML 2.0 initiative. 
There's:

- the tool developers
- advanced users
- novice users

If you can improve things for novice users in a way that only requires a few 
tweaks by tool developers then I think it should be done because the tool 
developers then get a whole bunch more users of their tools.

Application developers are currently choosing between the richness of XML, 
in particular its powerful tools, or the simplicity of JSON.  We could 
reinvent all the powerful XML tools to run with JSON.  Or we could simplify 
XML so that it was as simple as JSON, but, with a few minor tweaks to the 
tools, could make use of all the powerful XML tools.  This latter goal seems 
the one to go for to me.

The things we're talking about are not major architectural changes.  In 
terms of effort they're likely to be little more than maintenance fixes. 
Saxon is still being actively developed, as are Xerces and libxml etc.  If 
we're talking a day or so's tweaking then let's do it.

We should be brave enough to break a few eggs here!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Interface XML to C++ the easy way using C++ XML
data binding to convert XSD schemas to C++ classes.
Visit http://codalogic.com/lmx/ or http://www.xml2cpp.com
for more info
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@ibiblio.org>
To: "Dave Pawson" <davep@dpawson.co.uk>
Cc: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>; "XML Developers List" 
<xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0


>
> 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
>