Issues and tentative consensus

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I have just revised the Issues page on the wiki, and I'm going to try to
report what I think the consensus is, based on mailing list postings,
on each of these issues.  I assume I'll be wrong about some of these,
so don't hesitate to contradict me (as if you would).  Just make sure
to do it in separate per-issue postings.

1.  What character repertoire is allowed in names?  So far there has been
no demand to go past ASCII, but since I haven't noticed any posters who
aren't primarily anglophones, I'm not sure that counts.  Let's have more
input here.  Reasonable possibilities are to allow either just ASCII or
the XML 1.0 5th Edition / XML 1.1 choices.  The old XML 1.0 choice is
also possible, but implementing it would be pulling teeth.

2.  Should MicroXML support the authoring of PHP?  From what I understand,
<?PHP?> was introduced for XML's benefit exclusively.  If we don't
allow PIs at all, we are out of luck with this: you won't be able to
annotate a MicroXML document with PHP stuff and still treat it as a
MicroXML document.  OTOH, that is equally true of HTML5.

3. Are empty tags allowed?  The consensus so far seems to be yes.

4. Are PIs allowed?  This is the most controversial remaining item.
Everyone seems to agree that limiting them to start-tag format would be
a Good Thing.  I see three positions:

    A:  No PIs.

    B:  No PIs except in the prolog.

    C: PIs everywhere, as in XML.

Orthogonally to this, we could set things up so that a PI is a child
of the next element rather than being a sibling.  This would make PIs
in the prolog children of the root element.  However, it would require
an exception for a PI not followed by an element; that is, a PI in a
leaf element.

5.  Are comments allowed?  The consensus so far seems to be yes.
They assist human authoring, although they are not meant to convey
the semantics that the element is *always* empty.

6.  Are bare DOCTYPE declarations allowed?  If we are to have HTML5
valid documents that are also MicroXML, bare DOCTYPEs will be needed.
No consensus so far.

7.  Are CDATA sections allowed?  The consensus so far seems to be no.
They help spec writers, but they provide a loophole against escaping
content that doesn't actually work.  Nobody has asked for them.

8.  Are prefixes/namespaces allowed?  The consensus [sighs,
sucks teeth] seems to be no: no colons in names, a ban on "xmlns"
attributes, no namespaces.  The Automatic XML Namespaces proposal
<http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/print/Quin01/BalisageVol3-Quin01.html>
provides a method external to the document of implying namespaces on
prefix-free documents.  MicroAF would allow translation of prefix-free
attributes to the corresponding prefixed attributes, as would XSLT.

9. Are > characters allowed in attribute values?  There has been no
discussion, but nobody has asked for them.

10. Are decimal character references allowed?  There has been no
discussion, but nobody has asked for them.

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-- 
Man has no body distinct from his soul,              John Cowan
for that called body is a portion of the soul        cowan@ccil.org
discerned by the five senses,                        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
the chief inlets of the soul in this age.  --William Blake

Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2012 01:33:47 UTC