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

["Cory Nelson" <phrosty gmail com>]

On 6/15/07, Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com> wrote:
> 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 &#7; 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.

Better Unicode support is definitely not a minor thing.

Being a C++ developer, I fully support languages that give programmers
the full power to shoot their foot off if it means giving more
benefits to _good_ programmers.  Because bad programmers will always
be bad programmers, and they'll always find a way to misuse things.
(hint: they already do misuse XML)

You need a little more faith in the right people. :)

> Daniel