Re: > in attribute values; decimal character reference

On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 18:25 -0400, John Cowan wrote:

> 2) Versioning this kind of formats just doesn't work, as I have
> discovered the hard way.

I still believe that it *can* work if defined from the start and not
screwed up. What I think of as the BSD shared library versioning system
can work fine -
1. all m.n processors must accept x.y documents with x <= m
2. point releases (incrementing n and y) can't change semantics except
to define things that used to be errors (so a 3.1 processor must try to
process a 3.6 document, but might throw an error on a new feature)
3. if an incompatibility is introduced, the major number must be
increased in the spec.

XML 1.1 would have been called XML 2 by this rule. But, we didn't get
consensus on it soon enough (1997...). We already know XML 1.2 and XML 2
will both be rejected by most XML processors today. But we could do
better for µXML, perhaps.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2012 00:14:33 UTC