Re: ERB Decisions of March 26th

> 3. Should the XML declaration at the front of the document entity be
>    made optional?
> 
> [Ed. note: a *lot* of discussion on this one; made more difficult that
>  the people who wanted it optional could see good reasons for making it
>  compulsory, and those who wanted it compulsory could see good reasons
>  for making it optional]
> 
>  Optional: Bray, Clark, DeRose, Kimber, Magliery, Sharpe, Bosak
>  Required: Maler, Paoli, Sperberg-McQueen
> 
>  So it's now optional.

It must be made crystal clear that its absence implies:

o XML version 1.0 - documents complying with future versions are going
  to have to require the declaration for disambiguation
o UTF-8 or UCS-2 encoding - "An entity which begins with neither a
  Byte Order Mark nor an encoding declaration must be in the UTF-8
  encoding."
o RMD of ALL - "If no RMD is provided, the effect is identical to an
  RMD with the value ALL".  I disagree with this choice of defaults,
  but that is the current spec.

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden                  One Richmond Square
DynaText SIT Technical Support        Providence, RI 02906 USA
Inso Corporation                      +1.401.421.9550 (voice)
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Received on Wednesday, 26 March 1997 16:09:17 UTC