Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

[rjelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

 On Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:33:13 +0000, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> 
 wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> Let's break compatibility of both data and tools; just make sure
> there is a clean migration route in both directions for the data,
> which is where the big investment is.
>
> For a comment syntax, what's wrong with 
> <xml:comment>....</xml:comment>?

 So when you want to comment out a block of XSLT you will type all that 
 in?  Pulleaze :-)  Commenting is not just adding comments for 
 transmission, it is fiddling with the code in progress.

 I have recently added an attribute  @ignore in my experimental version 
 of Schematron, to allow commenting out semantically, without removal 
 from the infoset, plus it states the rationale.  It is good for allowing 
 stubbing out of code and top-down coding.

   <assert test="x/y/z"  ignore="fix later"> blah blag </assert>

 If you are going to "reconstruct" comments, you may need to enumerate 
 everything they are used for and provide alternatives  like @ignore to 
 every schema: reconstruction is the road that XML Schemas went down with 
 parameter entities and still missed out bits (conditional sections).

 What about this instead: after a < or <! any sequence of unicode 
 punctuation characters (or symmetrical swap character) is allowed as a 
 start delimiter, with the close delimiter being the repetition followed 
 by >, excluding /. This covers <!-- ... -->  and <? ... ?> and <![ ... 
 ]>  and new ones like <{  }> and <@ ... @>.  There would be one kind of 
 tag for these, with the name being the opening string (!--, ?, ![, {, @, 
 # whatever}. Systems that are not interested can ignore them. There 
 would only be one infoset item for them all. You could replace entity 
 reference syntax with  <&nbsp&>  too.



 Cheers
 Rick Jelliffe