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Re: Unicode and XML (was Re: Remembering theoriginal

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: Re: Unicode and XML (was Re: Remembering theoriginal XML vision)
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 09:54:32 -0800
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <oprko65ubyezizxn@s...>
• References: <7c.35a8563b.2b7ff77d@a...> <06cb01c2d5b0$d0073990$4bc8a8c0@A...> <3E4FC824.4040208@t...> <oprko65ubyezizxn@s...>
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Mike Champion wrote:

>> Fair enough, but if you remove all the unicode-character apparatus 
>> from XML 1.0 you probably cut that in half.  Which is one of the only 
>> important *technical* differences between XML and SGML - SGML was 
>> really underspecified on what a "character" was.  At the end of the 
>> day XML's main technical contribution may turn out to have been that 
>> it dragged Unicode into the mainstream.
> 
> Stupid question:  Why couldn't XML incorporate Unicode by reference 
> rather than spending half of the spec defining the "unicode-character 
> apparatus"?

Well, XML1.1 is moving in that direction.  Even given that, I think that 
XML 1.0's approach, with a big table right in the spec saying "here are 
the legal characters", was probably correct; I (and I'm sure many other 
programmers) ran a perl script over the spec to extract the char parsing 
tables.   -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Unicode and XML (was Re: Remembering the original XML vision)
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>

• References:
  • Re: Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...
  • Re: Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
  • Re: Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Unicode and XML (was Re: Remembering the original XML vision)
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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