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Re: The XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation is published

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: The XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation is published
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 06:56:46 -0400
• In-reply-to: <200210161048.GAA04455@m...>
• References: <200210161048.GAA04455@m...>

This release has a few big new features:

C0 control characters such as form feed, vertical tab, BEL, and DC1
through DC4 (whatever those are) are now allowed in XML text. However, they
must be escaped as character references. They cannot be included literally in
data. Nulls, thankfully, are still forbidden.

The C1 control characters such as BPH, IND, NBH, and PU1 are no longer
allowed as literals in XML text. They too must now be escaped as character
references. For the first time this means that some well-formed XML 1.0
documents are not well-formed XML 1.1 documents. The exception, of course, is
IBM's holy grail of NEL, which will be allowed in literal XML text, just to
make life difficult for every text editor on the planet except those from IBM
mainframes.

Unicode character normalization should be performed on XML documents,
unless you don't feel like it, in which case you can ignore it. This almost
makes sense. Basically it says that parsers may change an e followed by a
combining accent acute into the single character é if they want to or the
client asks for it. The details are quite complicated, but at least it's
optional. However, I still worry that this is a source of interoperability
problems, especially when it comes to names of elements and attributes. For
instance, a normalizing validator might accept documents a non-normalizing
validator would reject.

And of course all the other problems previous drafts have had are
still present. I've already calumnied these sufficiently in the past.
There doesn't seem to be much point to repeating those now since the
core working group seems hell-bent on going down this road no matter
what outsiders say.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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