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RE: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

• From: Mike.Champion@S...
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 13:54:27 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 12:43 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)
>

>
> Tim Bray attributed me with saying that "changing XML is
> unthinkable". That's not my position. It is thinkable, but
> before we do it, I want it shown conclusively that change is
> needed. So far that proof is sorely lacking.

I'd make the analogy of trying to convince Dubya that global warming is real.  By the time the proof is unambiguous, it will be too late.

Failing to modify XML to fix the various problems with the 1.0 spec that come to light won't cause mass starvation and put Florida underwater, but it will invite fragmentation and competition: Someone will "embrace and extend" XML to fix the NEL problem, someone else will "fix" their parser to handle Unicode 3.1 the way their Asian customers want to use it, somebody other than the W3C will try to standardize a different flavor of "SGML for the Web", various big companies will tell their customers to ignore the failed experiment of markup standards and stick with their proprietary solutions ... and pretty soon we'll have a situation that would make the XML 1.0 / 1.1 compatibility problems look trivial by comparison. 

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