Re forcing XML 1.0 (was Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT]: Xerces-J 2.6.0 now available)

[Joseph Kesselman]

Personal reactions, for whatever it's worth:

1) It's definitely worth letting users insist on 1.0 output, for the case where you know you're going to be sending the data to an old tool which won't handle 1.1.

2) On the other hand I agree that it's in the best interests of the community as a whole to try to push everyone toward tolerating XML 1.1. (It's not as if doing so is a serious hardship, especially if you don't expect your users' documents to use the features which make 1.1 different from 1.0.)

3) On the other other hand, I think it's worth clearly documenting how to obtain a 1.0-only parser for those (rare, but not impossible) cases where it really is the right answer. I'm not entirely convinced this has to be made *easy*, given (2) above, but if we can do it without adverse impact I wouldn't object to offering it. It does sorta fall in the category of "Are you REALLY sure? Are you aware that you're giving a competetive advantage to anyone who doesn't enforce this archaic limitation? Are you aware that you're going to upset your customers, who don't want to be forced to code down to your level? Are you aware that this really isn't saving you much work?"

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Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more.
"The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee
got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk