Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 23:33 +0000, Michael Kay wrote:
[...]
> For a comment syntax, what's wrong with <xml:comment>....</xml:comment>?

When we were first working on XML (or Web SGML)... I wanted head and
body elements - xmlhead and xmlbody... the argument against them
was that it'd intrude into the document designer's space... but when
the whole [xX][mM][lL] prefix was reserved we didn't reopen this.

I'd hoped that we could have document fragments that could be
reused, inside the head, reducing the pressure on entities.

Comments were another area where an earlier decision's premise
was changed and not revisited -- it was a given that every valid
XML document must also be a valid SGML document, but for the first
of the two years of design work it also seemed a given than SGML
could not be changed.  When the possibility arose of changing SGML,
we could have a different comment syntax, but we'd spent long enough
arguing about comments that we didn't reopen it. 

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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