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is XML complete?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: is XML complete?
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 12:38:21 -0500

The recent Character Entities discussion has been enlightening on a
number of levels, but what struck me most interesting is that it's the
first discussion we've had in a while about whether XML was really
missing something.

Looking at the three original aspects of XML (syntax, linking, styling),
it looks like they may be close to done.

There is ongoing work on XML, but I think it's fair to characterize both
XML 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 primarily as efforts to clean up
outstanding issues (Unicode tracking, excess namespace declarations)
while possibly sliding something new in (NEL, IRIs) rather than any kind
of new structure or significant modification.

XML Schema, so far as I can tell, has exhausted its participants and I
haven't heard much talk on that front.  Critics seem to have moved
elsewhere, and supporters occasionally talk about trimming it, but
there's not much activity there.

XLink is finished, though hardly anyone uses it, and XPointer is
apparently in a dash to the finish before the WG expires on 31 December.
Whether XPointer will find more use than XLink thus far remains to be
seen.

XSLT is certainly growing in its 2.0 development process, but it's far
from clear that there's strong community support for more than a few
pieces of it.  XSLT could use a cleanup/minor addition process, but that
doesn't seem particularly likely to happen, at least given current W3C
activity.

Are there more issues like Character Entities waiting to surface?  Or
(apart from that issue) can XML declare victory and call itself
complete?

-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

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