• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:52:18 -0800

Michael Kay wrote:
>> Growing but not infinite. There's a hard limit of a few more 
>> than a million spaces for characters in Unicode.
> 
> There was a hard limit of 127 characters in ASCII. That didn't stop anyone.
> They might have to rename it Multicode, but it will still happen.
> 

Not in our lifetime or XML's, possibly not in humanity's. It took 
humanity thousands of years to invent the ~100,000 characters in Unicode 
today. It will take at least thousands more to invent the next 900,000.

I strongly suspect that by the time the Unicode million-character limit 
becomes a real issue (if it ever does) XML will be a quaint legacy 
technology at best. I would not be at all surprised if by that point in 
history, markup as such has been thoroughly replaced  by natural 
language, and I would be no more surprised if we're not using Turing 
machines at all.

--
Elliotte

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>

• References:
  • Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@r...>
  • Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Dave Pawson <davep@d...>
  • Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • RE: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
  • Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • RE: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
  • Re: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • RE: Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>