Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

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

Original Message From: "Michael Kay"

> I've been interested to read people's views that comments should be 
> allowed to contain "non-well-formed" content. It's a worthwhile point, but 
> I don't find it compelling. The editing tool that creates the comment can 
> always escape any markup within the comment.


What if you're just sketching out the outline of your XML; back of envelope 
stuff.  So you want to do something like:

<xml:comment>
    Need something like:
    <path ...location attrs...>
        Either <route> or set of <stage> elements
        <Complexity (or should that be <difficulty>)>
            Need a couple of metrics here
        </>
</xml:comment>

Why should the XML community insist that that has to be well-formed?  Does 
the XML community gain anything by it being well-formed?

I could make the above well-formed, but as a developer I might want to do a 
brain-dump and come back to it later.  What right do we have to insist that 
a developer has to fix the above comment before moving onto something else?

Or the IDE could 'fix' it, but I imagine that that would just put in a bunch 
of gibberish that the developer would later have to unpick.

I think we should make XML easier to use, not harder.

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
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