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One thread of this discussion seems to be: how much can we trim out of XML 1.0 to wind up with something yet leaner, clearner and easier to use? The other seems to be: if we could add just a bit, such as allowing more than one root element, what would it be? In that latter vein, I'm curious that nobody has discussed what I have always thought was one of the most questionnable compromises in XML: it's a hierarchical format that can't contain nested instances of itself. Given XML's SGML roots as a system for coding individual documents that may have been sensible, but we now see lots of cases in which XML is used as a container format. SOAP is one example, but there are lots of other cases in which it would be tempting to carry one document inside another. The inability to cleanly nest XML documents within each other is a major limitation and complication, IMO. So, a question: what would be the cost/benefit of allowing XML declaration(s) nested to arbitrary depth within an XML document? I think the semantics should probably be that nested documents have semantics relatively independent of the container, which suggests that namespace prefix bindings not be inherited, that there be a separate scope for ID/IDREF resolution and conflict detection, etc. Of course, there are significant complexity tradeoffs, Even if the specfication for the XML part of this could be written in a clean and compact way, there would obviously be knock-on effects on APIs, XPath, XML Query, XML Schema, etc. So, this would be a not at all trivial or entirely compatible change to the stack. Still, I think that a feature like this has merits in principle. I'm not at all convinced that the community is ready for a new XML at all, and if it is, I'm not ready to claim that that the benefits of doing this now outweigh the attendant cost and confusion. Still, if we're daydreaming about newer and cleaner XMLs, I think this should at least be part of the debate. Noah -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
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