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Re: UTF-8+names

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: UTF-8+names
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 10:47:06 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20031019034635.91162.qmail@w...>

mc@x... (Mike Champion) writes:
>No more than any other non-trivial encoding, which gets in to deep
>philosophical territory about whether "Ë?" is the same as "oe" or
>whether the a Chinese character that looks like and has the same root
>meaning as a Kanji character is the "same" character or not.  Or
>whether the Unicode NEL character is a "standard" newline character
>because it is mainly used in those mainframes we like to pretend don't
>exit :-) Tim's approach is taking a real, widespread problem and
>offering a clean, layered solution -- essentially a character encoding
>preprocessor -- rather than changing XML itself.

This makes me laugh hysterically, as the original notion of Unicode was
to develop a big enough space that all the characters could live in
happy co-existence without need for layering in the character space.

Unicode itself ran out of room and put in surrogates.  Now it seems
that we've run out of patience and added yet another layer of
processing in the middle.

>IMHO, it extends the Unicode encoding layer upwards to
>remove a wart in XML, not vice-versa.

The wart has remained in XML because the W3C hasn't dared address
entities directly, and instead we end up with side-paths like XInclude
and now this bizarre boil.  They create new problems while thinking the
old ones are gone.  It reminds me of spackling holes in walls with
toothpaste.

>Anyway, I think this is a great idea, and I
>congratulate Tim for working it out and moving it
>forward.  

I think this is an idea with so many problems that it's hard to sort out
which are catastrophic and which are merely details.  Perhaps I should
just capitulate, since the "solutions" for XML's acknowledged problems
seem to get worse and worse and worse and worse.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: Tony Graham <Tony.Graham@S...>
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• References:
  • Re: UTF-8+names
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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