Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> I think this XML 1.1 version is a big step forward from previous versions: the XML Core
> WG has considerably toned down on their initial features, to the point where now XML 1.1
> may well be better than XML 1.0.
Yes, I agree with Rick, this is much better than previous drafts. I
have one major heartburn.
> 3) Characters
>
> XML 1.1's new character production is, I think, a real step forward for XML.
> It allows almost more kinds of characters to be sent, and so improves XML
> for data exchange. But it also disallows controls from being sent directly
> (numeric character references must be sent), which takes a good stand that
> XML is a textual format: that a control character sent in the data stream
> *is* a control character and not data content.
My problem is that XML has de facto been a significant step forward for
interoperability between heterogeneous systems, and this seems like a
step backward. At the moment, we can say confidently that XML markup
exposes logical structure unambiguously, and the content is text, which
means a sequence of unicode characters, and the characters have the
semantics that Unicode says they have. This is fine for characters such
as 'a' or ∫ (the integral sign), but the range � -  is
another kettle of fish. By my reading, none of the characters in the
ranges 0-#x7, #xb, #xe-#x1a have any agreed-upon semantics de jure or de
facto (let's go down to the mall and do some ).
This seems to me to break the basic promise of XML.
And furthermore, the reason why our friends at Microsoft & IBM et al
want this is so they can take filthy dirty data out of database fields
and wrap XML tags around it and claim interoperability, which is pretty
questionable. -Tim
