Re: [xml-dev] Supporting Unicode (was Some comments on the 1.1 dr aft)

On Thursday 20 December 2001 01:36 am, Alan Kent wrote:
>And thats where it gets hard. Philisophically, is it better to stop
>people from doing things that might be wrong or better to allow people
>to do more things and wear the responsibility if it was wrong?

This is really a serious part of the question here. I personally tend toward 
"more choice, more personal responsibility"  philosophically. That said, I 
also live a lawful life and abide my the constraints that society places upon 
me (for the most part). 

Martin Duerst has a very good saying here: that standards establish the 
*mininum* level of interoperability. For XML to be a pervasivley used as it 
is, especially as a document markup language, I think it is important to 
place some restrictions on it. 

At a more abstract level, XML is defined in terms of characters, and many of 
the control characetrs are really debatably characters in the first place. 
Unicode, like many standards, is a compromise, and the control characters are 
an artifact of that compromise.

XML does not have to inherit the sins of others.