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Re: Anti-Ranti

• From: David Brownell <david-b@p...>
• To: "Steven R. Newcomb" <srn@t...>, ricko@a...
• Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 10:09:42 -0800

> > Tangentially, this is also why I, apparantly alone in the world, think
> > that PIs are so important--they are the only thing that are utterly
> > outside the control of the standardizers who dislike plurality ...

You're not alone.  Another reason PIs are important is that they let you
escape certain structural prisons when they're not needed.


> > Getting rid of [XML Processing Instructions (PIs)] (without making
> > some replacement, such as a convention that you can always add
> > elements or attributes from other namespaces and that no schema
> > language should enforce otherwise--impractical) plays into the hands
> > of the embrace-and-extenders.
> 
> I would have thought that PIs would be the very last feature of XML
> anyone could possibly want to do away with.  Who or what is trying to
> get rid of XML PIs, and why?

I understand there's a desire to make XML be something that old HTML
browsers can't choke on -- to have it be backward-compatible with
certain non-HTML, non-SGML tools ... the very tools XML was supposed
to let us escape (ones without even usably correct HTML support).

There's also a certain feeling they're "inelegant".  I can't buy that
when they solve so many problems directly and simply.

Completely nonsensical to me.  But those sentiments float around W3C,
and have evidently led to a diktat that no W3C spec will use PIs, or
even apparently accomodate them as well as they accomodate elements
or attributes.  

- Dave



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