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Re: Was there a technical issue for the demise of XML 1.1?

• From: David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle@gmail.com>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2018 22:00:02 +0100

On Mon, 8 Oct 2018 at 21:01, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> It is my understanding that the reason for the demise of XML 1.1 was simply that it was never adopted by the community - people were already using 1.0 and there was no compelling reason for moving to 1.1. Was there also a technical issue for its demise?

One reason was that the syntax rules for xml 1.0 didn't really allow
any forward compatibility.
If you put <?xml version="1.1"?> at the top of your file then at the
time essentially all xml parsers would parse it as xml 1.0 and give a
fatal syntax error.
Even if they had options to parse as xml 1.1 (which most didn't) it
wasn't always possible or convenient to arrange that the consumer was
an xml 1.1 parser.

Note in contrast that for example XSLT 1.0 did always specify that
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" was legal and specified what a 1.0
processor was supposed to do with that input.

That's why  XML 1.0 edition 5 which back ported most of the 1.1
changes to 1.0 was more successful: even though procedurally it was at
best "dubious", it didn't force xml producers to produce documents
that would fail to parse in the majority of consuming applications.

David


>
> /Roger
>
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• References:
  • Was there a technical issue for the demise of XML 1.1?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>