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Saturday, November 3, 2007

XML 1.0: Possible Relaxation of Restrictions on Element/Attribute Names

Excerpt from the memo requesting user feedback: "Since XML 1.1 became
a W3C Recommendation in August 2006, there has been a substantial
uptake of it as a peer of XML 1.0 in new and ongoing W3C work. This
is appropriate, as XML 1.1 was explicitly not designed to replace XML 1.0,
but to supplement it for the benefit of various groups against which
XML 1.0 had unjustly, but unintentionally, discriminated. However, there
are very few XML 1.1 documents in the wild. The XML Core WG believes this
to be the result of a vicious cycle, in which widely distributed XML
parsers do not support 1.1 because the parser authors believe that few
document authors will use it. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,
as those who would benefit from XML 1.1 are rightfully concerned that
documents written in it will not be widely acceptable... Unicode has
expanded further to reach 5.0, and it is nowhere near complete with
respect to the world's minority languages and writing systems. If XML
1.0 relaxed the restrictions on element and attribute names, those who
preferred to retain the Appendix B constraints in their documents would
be free to do so, but those who wish to use element and attribute names
in languages normally written in any of the Ethiopic, Cherokee, Canadian
Syllabics, Khmer, Mongolian, Yi, Philippine, New Tai Lue, Buginese,
Syloti Nagri, N'Ko, and Tifinagh scripts will be able to do so, as will
users of minority languages whose scripts appeared in Unicode 2.0 but
were lacking essential letters for writing those languages... The XML
Core WG assumes that if such an erratum were to be passed into XML 1.0,
the XML 1.1 Recommendation would eventually be deprecated by the W3C.
Paul Grosso, writing on behalf of the XML Core Working Group, notes
that comments on all aspects of this possibility are earnestly
solicited; please send them to the [publicly archived list] SEND More Information See also the XML Core Working Group: Click Here

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