Re: 12. Are C1 controls and Unicode non-characters disallowed?

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:55 PM, Mike Sokolov <sokolov@falutin.net> wrote:

> On 9/8/2012 1:14 AM, James Clark wrote:
>
>>
>> I find the case for excluding non-characters pretty compelling. I would
>> state it like this:
>>
> Just for the sake of completeness, would you mind explaining what's
> compelling about it?


A design that disallows #xFFFE and #xFFFF but allows all other
non-characters can be justified only by appealing to history.  As I
mentioned earlier, I want to avoid that as much as possible.

 a) I want to minimize the things in MicroXML that make sense only if
> you know the historical context of MicroXML. If somebody who knows
> nothing about XML reads the MicroXML spec, I want their reaction to
> be: this is a pretty reasonable way to do document markup.  Wherever
> possible I want to eliminate things that would appear strange to
> somebody with no XML background. To put it another way, I want
> MicroXML not just to be simpler than XML but less ugly (more beautiful
> would be going too far).  In my view allowing an "xml:" prefix on
> attributes increases the ugliness of the language.


James