Allowing Unicode characters in names

>
> 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.


I think we should allow non-ASCII names, and the XML 1.0 5th Edition is the
best way to do it.

Non-ASCII names don't seem to be used all that much.  However, I don't have
any hard data.  More importantly, I believe MicroXML should support users
doing generic markup in the "right" way.  If you are designing a vocabulary
for something that is inherently specific to a particular country, then
it's a perfectly natural, reasonable thing to do is to use the language of
that country for the names of your elements and attributes. I can't find
the link, but Murata-san has described some examples from Japan, where
Japanese industry standards use Japanese for element names, for which it
would have been very hard to find English translations.  I would feel
really bad disallowing this kind of thing.

I also think it would look really bad for a committee of anglophones to
decide on behalf of the non-English speaking peoples of the world that they
should use English for their element and attribute names.

James