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Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation

• To: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
• Subject: Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 12:14:36 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <200210161048.GAA04455@m...> <p04330101b9d2f5d9ffde@[192.168.254.4]> <1034773151.1556.125.camel@marajen> <01ec01c2751c$4fac9640$4bc8a8c0@A...>
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Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> I think this XML 1.1 version is a big step forward from previous versions: the XML Core
> WG has considerably toned down on their initial features, to the point where now XML 1.1
> may well be better than XML 1.0.

Yes, I agree with Rick, this is much better than previous drafts.  I 
have one major heartburn.

> 3) Characters
> 
> XML 1.1's new character production is, I think, a real step forward for XML.
> It allows almost more kinds of characters to be sent, and so improves XML
> for data exchange.  But it also disallows controls from being sent directly
> (numeric character references must be sent), which takes a good stand that
> XML is a textual format: that a control character sent in the data stream
> *is* a control character and not data content. 

My problem is that XML has de facto been a significant step forward for 
interoperability between heterogeneous systems, and this seems like a 
step backward.  At the moment, we can say confidently that XML markup 
exposes logical structure unambiguously, and the content is text, which 
means a sequence of unicode characters, and the characters have the 
semantics that Unicode says they have.  This is fine for characters such 
as 'a' or ∫ (the integral sign), but the range � -  is 
another kettle of fish.  By my reading, none of the characters in the 
ranges 0-#x7, #xb, #xe-#x1a have any agreed-upon semantics de jure or de 
facto (let's go down to the mall and do some ).

This seems to me to break the basic promise of XML.

And furthermore, the reason why our friends at Microsoft & IBM et al 
want this is so they can take filthy dirty data out of database fields 
and wrap XML tags around it and claim interoperability, which is pretty 
questionable. -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
  • Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
    • From: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>

• References:
  • Re: The XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation is published
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
  • Re: The XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation is published
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: The XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation is published
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>
  • Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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