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David Brownell wrote > >Whoever coined that "ASCII of the Web" meme either missed, >or explicitly avoided, addressing the role of Unicode. I tend to >think it was the latter option, considering all the exceptions XML >made to the Unicode rules for character classes. As it stands, >the XML 1.0 spec is effectively independent of changes from the >Unicode consortium, but still leverages Unicode where it's most >essential (representation of text, not markup). > I coined it (as far as I know, nobody used it before me); it was meant to be a high-level description of the fact that XML can become pervasive as a means of representing data, just as ASCII is, and that one day in the future, most (all?) systems will be expected to understand XML. They may need to translate XML into their own internal structures, just as EBCDIC machines will translate ASCII into their own characters. The fact that XML uses Unicode is important to that saying; the fact that XML misses some of the characters is less important to the 50,000-foot view when telling people why they should look into what XML can do for them. Lauren -- ----------- Lauren Wood, Director of Product Technology, SoftQuad Software Chair, XML 2001 - Call for presentations now open at www.xmlconference.org
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