Re: [xml-dev] what's missing in XML? What's coming?

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

On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 00:18 +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> 1) A standard and ubiquitous directory listing format (and XPath functions
> for XSLT and XProc etc) that will allow, for example, a document in a ZIP
> archive to get a listing of all other documents in that ZIP archive.  ODF
> and OOXML etc are not fringe uses of XML. If it works with MIME multipart,
> then a big fat huzzah too.

Interesting, thanks. Has anyone designed and/or implemented anything
like this?

An XPath Functions Community Group might be a way to get that sort of
thing to W3C's attention in the future, by the way.

> 
> 2) Clearer story on how to use the ISO/MathML entity sets along with XML
> Schemas, or with no schemas. I often hear "XML Schemas does not support
> entities, so I cannot use entities with XML Schemas" or vice versa.

It's perfectly possible, of course, to use a DTD (or DTD fragment
defining entities) with XML Schema.

> Preferably, build the default mappings of the entities into XML.
The challenge here is backwards compatibility, although it could be done
by using a different escaping character, e.g. the little-used "v v
ligature" ("w") :-)

It's interesting that I haven't seen any comments along these lines from
the MathML WG. Probably they are more steeped in the arcane lore of DTDs
and Schema Languages than the average MathML user.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd for sure like to hear more about these
topics.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/