On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 12:13 +0000, Pete Cordell wrote:
> Taking ideas from various internet protocol negotiation schemes, can we
> include a uxmldecl that includes a "require" attribute that lists features
> the uXML parser must support.
>
> For example:
>
> <?uxml require="ns pi"?>
As soon as you do that your spec no longer defines a single language,
but 2^n languages, where n is the number of things you can write.
It really hurts interoperability.
Language negotiation lets the server choose the single preferred value.
So you only need n variants, not 2^n
You did go on to say,
>
> BTW - I think its important to agree that we are only looking for 3 or 4
> widely implemented features, rather than 3 or 4 million! If we have too
> many then we lose interoperability. Things analogous to XML namespaces and
> xml:id that were added to XML after the initial release of XML are the sorts
> of things we should be looking for.
so, so far you've listed 3, and I can easily see a dozen more happening.
comments
lax error handling
processing instructions
namespaces, namespace path, external namespace definition files
xml:base
xml:id
xinclude
microschema, microentitydefinitions... :)
mixed content and xml:space
and so on and so forth
Better to say, either use microxml or xml.
XML succeeded largely because of the XML Promise -- every XML processor
is licensed by the XML Specification to process any XML document.
I *do* think there would be mileage in a hook for later extensions,
e.g. reserving <µxml>...
Liam
--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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