XML 1.1 does solve real needs, just perhaps not your specific needs. Remember, you're not the only user of XML technology in the world.
May I ask whose needs? I have repeatedly asked for evidence that anyone actually needs this. I have repeatedly been met with claims that merely asking the question is somehow morally offensive. To this day, I know exactly one person who has expressed some interest in using the new features of XML 1.1. I know one other person who has said they might theoretically need this at some point in the future, though they have not actually encountered such a need yet. It's not like there's a clamor of people demanding this stuff.
This reminds me of your posts on xml-dev a long time ago when people were discussing XML 1.1. I was working at the IBM research labs in Japan at the time and people there were rolling their eyes (figuratively) at your suggestion that English was good enough for element and attribute names... ;)
I'm pretty damn sure I never said any such thing. I think you're either misremembering something I did say, or taking it so severely out of context as to distort its meaning. I ask that you either produce evidence for that claim by URL reference to the xml-dev archives, or retract that statement.
I think we all need to remember that there are many perspectives and solutions to any problem. And some of them may not make much sense to an individual but may have value to the collective group.
Indeed. My claim is that there is no such collective group for XML 1.1. I challenge you to produce actual users who need these new features. If you can do that, then step two is to demonstrate that the benefits of XML 1.1 for these users outweigh the costs imposed on the rest of the world by XML 1.1. To date, no one has been willing to even attempt this calculation, I think because they realize that the benefits for a very, very few are vastly outweighed by the disadvantages suffered by the very, very many.
I have no fundamental, technical objection to adding the new scripts in Unicode 3.0 and 4.0 to XML. Well, I do object to adding the musical symbols, and the mathematical letters are a security problem that's going to bite somebody badly sooner or later, but I don't mind Burmese, Cambodian, Cherokee, and so forth. However, I just don't think the minor benefits of adding these scripts come close to outweighing the costs of the entire proposal.
I do think that adding NEL (and the Unicode line separator character) to XML is technically flawed and has huge costs in and of itself, irrespective of the problems of adding any new version of XML. I also think that Unicode normalization, the way it is implemented in XML 1.1, is pointless and confusing. I dispute these on their own merits or lack thereof. Adding new scripts I could accept if the total benefits outweighed the costs. Sadly though, that's not even close to true here.
anything I'm surprised it's as good as it is. There really are very few design mistakes in XML 1.0. It's a very nice piece of work.
Really?
Despite having worked with XML awhile now, I'm still no big fan of the syntax. I wish that the DTD syntax (and inline grammar associations, in general) had been broken out of the original spec. Namespaces, like Bray's skunkworks that you mention, should have been incorporated from the beginning. And I have no need, personally, of notations which would probably make SGML folks bristle at the thought... ;)
If I were going back in time to join the XML Working Group circa 1996, notations are certainly one of the thing I would argue against. Overall, though, I don't find them so much harmful as unused. Removing them would make the spec smaller and simpler. But they don't seem to cause a lot of problems in day-to-day use as contrasted with, for example, the internal DTD subset, which lots of parsers including Xerces still don't get quite right.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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