Re: [xml] When will you support xml version 1.1?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 09:56:30PM -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 10:19 +0200, Oliver Meyer wrote:
> [...]
> > So, the short answer is "No, libxml is not going to support xml version
> > 1.1".
>
> I think this is sad.  I agree that  is a silliness that we could
> do without -- it was an unhappy compromise, and at the same time lthe
> literal C1 controls (equally meaningless) were banned, which actually
> helps catch a whole bunch of errors.
>
> It's rare that a change to a spec makes everyone happy.  I'm not
> sure we (W3C) made _anyone_ happy with XML 1.1, unfortunately.
>
> The worst is requiring XML 1.0 processors to reject XML 1.1
> documents, I think that was a big mistake.  But I'd still
> like to see libxml support XML 1.1.

  I don't think adding support for 1.1 would be so drastic as requiring
a fork as Michael suggests. But I don't think the ratio of advantages
vs. disadvantages for supporting it is in its favor. It does fragment
the set of tools and users. The technical merits are very limited
(i.e. better UNICODE support) and all I expect is people to actually
use it only for polluting the XML processing chain with uncleaned data
from databases. I think one of the main advantage of XML taking over the
industry has been to force people to understand better what a character
is, what a string means (or not). Opening the gate with just a blind
escaping get us back 10 years backward for no good reason. There is
very little to gain, and an awful lot to loose, so I'm not in favor.
One may thing it's arrogance to say I know better, but considering
how many time I made mistake myself in that area, and how often I need
to get people to learn about this stuff, I guess it's just a matter 
of evidence one can collect by browsing the archives of this list.

Daniel

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