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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: NMTOKENS: good or evil?
 Laurent Le Meur wrote: >It is still bizarre that a native feature of xml has so little support in first >generation xml tools, and forces users to manipulate strings "by hand". But ... >xml is a young technology. > > Not bizarre at all. Developers want XML technologies to reflect their needs. So they expose the parts of XML that they need, and don't do anything that would promote or entrench the extraneous parts of XML. This freedom in the long run gives us better and simpler technology, they hope, but at the cost of making the current technology ratty, tatty and shitty. It seems a little cynical sometimes. And futile: the next generation of technology with the same attitude will also be shitty. The better way is to let the market of users decide what is good technology, not the whims of implementers. (So rather than providing no API for PIs, for example, provide the API but give arguments why it is no good.) I think this distinction is quite important: when an implementer buys into a standard, they are buying into an agreement for a complete and common set of features; when a user buys into a standard, they only need to buy into the features they need. Think of the havoc caused to XSD early on by tools that generated ambiguous content models. (Of course, perhaps the most bizarre of all is when one standard adds features to support some other standard, but then alters them so they are no longer compatible: think xsi:nil and xs:NOTATION. "I have come not to praise NOTATION/NULL but to bury him!") Cheers Rick Jelliffe 
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