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RE: Some comments on the 1.1 draft

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
• From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>
• Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 11:04:39 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...]
> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 10:19 AM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re:  Some comments on the 1.1 draft
> 

> Rick's point is that these are not text. The fact that they 
> are characters in 
> Unicode is more an accident of history than anything else, I think. 

Perhaps, but the job of determining what is and is not a "character,"
sorting out the numerous issues surrounding platforms and human languages,
and explaining decisions in an authoritative manner is the Unicode
consortium's role in the world, not the W3C's.  I don't mean to disrespect
the excellent work that went into XML 1.0, but in 20:20 hindsight it appears
that the WG went a bit too far in second-guessing Unicode.  

It seems to me that XML 1.1 will be made simpler, more modular, and more
widely useful outside SGML's traditional domain by layering the XML data
model and serialization rules on top of the Unicode character model.
Certain minimal tweaks to Unicode may make sense, for example, NUL is
awfully problematic for many languages to deal with, and I can see making an
exception an disallowing � from a well-formed XML document.  Most of the
other points that have been raised in these threads seem quite feasible to
handle by serializing "control characters" with numeric character entity
references, by fixing a few open-source editors to be more Unicode/XML
1.1-friendly, and so on.

I haven't changed my original opinion: it's time to eat the platform-neutral
standards dogfood.  Yum yum,  sigh.  FWIW, my dogs would rather eat our food
than theirs, but that's the price they pay for not starving out in the wild.

Usual disclaimer ... our developers who have to actually implement 1.1 may
disagree with these pontifications.

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