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

On 10 September 2012 14:26, Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net> wrote:

> ...
> Even if it were an added burden on Web devs I have no idea how it breaks
> the whole point of having MicroXML.  Certainly it would contradict nothing
> in the stated goals.
>
> ...
>


Maybe it's worth going back to that July 2010 discussion on XML-Dev
which seemed at the time to be the key precursor to MicroXML
starting with http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/201007/msg00059.html
and continuing on the subsequent thread (until MicroXML was
mentioned later at the end of that year).

To quote Andrew Welch's original mailing ('hackable xml')
"One of the reasons I think non-XML devs struggle with XML is because
while it looks simple, it's actually very complex - while it appears
to be just-angle-brackets and can be treated as a string (and often
is) it really must be parsed and serialised using a specialist tool
for the job..."

Is making MicroXML less of a 'struggle for non-XML devs' still a goal?
If so then making it easy to parse MicroXML is surely crucial. In that
case worries about what has to be excluded as 'illegal' need to be
minimised don't they?

A problem many developers have is still the exclusion of illegal
characters and part of that problem is that XML has a different
set of illegal characters to HTML. Having to check for illegal
characters which the browser itself doesn't exclude is a pain
which puts many off using XML. They want such checks to be
part of the invisible 'magic' functionality that just happens (either
in the HTML engine or the javascript engine, say, though they'd
rather not have to worry about where it happens either). If the
lowly developer has to deal with it they get into that ugly problem
that a parser can't parse the XML because it isn't valid and so they
have to find a way to exclude such illegal characters without the
help of a ready-made parser. It isn't nice.

If this is a key factor putting off developers (or if they find they are
using tools which don't do it all for them and that gives them hell)
then if MicroXML doesn't solve that, how does it hope to get take
up from such developers? Maybe though, these aren't the type
of developers being targeted by MicroXML, in which case I stand
corrected.

Cheers

Stephen D Green