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RE: Best Practice for designing XML vocabularies containing ac

• From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2013 21:57:38 +0000

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the feedback. 

Okay, my Best Practice proposal is a Really Bad Idea. That in itself is Really Useful Information.

I like Jim Melton's idea:

   	... normalize all input documents before 
    	validating or otherwise processing them.

So I hereby propose this new Best Practice:

	Use one normalization form (NFC or NFD) for
             expressing the name of all elements and attributes.
	Either NFC or NFD may be used, whichever is
	best-suited for you. Whichever form is chosen,
	be consistent.

	Recipients of XML: do not assume the XML will
	be NFC-encoded. Normalize all XML documents
	and all XML Schemas before validating and before
	processing.

Here is an XSLT program that will normalize any XML instance and any XML Schema to NFC:

	<xsl:output method="xml" normalization-form="NFC"/>

	<xsl:template match="/">
	        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
	</xsl:template>

Here is an XSLT program that will normalize any XML instance and any XML Schema to NFD:

	<xsl:output method="xml" normalization-form="NFD"/>

	<xsl:template match="/">
	        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
	</xsl:template>

Apply one of those XSLT programs to all XML and XML Schema documents before validation and processing.

Thoughts?

/Roger

• References:
  • Best Practice for designing XML vocabularies containing accentedcharacters -- allow both composed and decomposed forms
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: Best Practice for designing XML vocabularies containing accented characters -- allow both composed and decomposed forms
    • From: Jim Melton <jim.melton@oracle.com>