For what it's worth I'd like to point out that the first error was to
make schema processing happen by default. I'm not sure whether people
care to do the right thing or not at this point but here is what I
think.

To be backward compatible everytime a new feature is added it must be
off by default. That way, new applications can get the new behavior by
turning the new feature on and old applications still get the old
behavior they need not to break.

The general trend seems to be "let's make it easy for new applications",
but that's just plain wrong. If you care about backward compatibility
that is. I do, but I seem to represent a minority, since everytime such
a question gets raised I have to go to the front to make my point
again...

So, the right thing would be to change the default of schema processing
to false. Then, when schema is turned on, you can decide whether
normalize-element-contents is on or off by default. I don't think that
it doesn't matter that much nor that it is wrong one way or the other.
It's just a matter of convention.

This said, given that it was broken a year ago there are reasons not to
want to fix it anymore. It is very possible that old applications have
had to be altered to cope with the change and fixing it now would then
force them to be altered again. Bummer...
-- 
Arnaud  Le Hors - IBM, XML Standards Strategy Group / W3C AC Rep.

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