Re: SDATA, again

Jon Bosak writes:
| [Michael Sperberg-McQueen:]
| | The problem of characters not known to an application is a real and
| | serious one.  I'd like to see some discussion of how to solve it,
| | rather than further special pleading for SDATA, which seems to me to
| | be a band-aid for the problem, not a solution to it.  We need a real
| | solution, not a band-aid, and I am not convinced that SDATA is even a
| | part of a real solution.
| Agreed, but I hasten to point out that this W3C working group is not
| the place to develop such a solution.  People who are serious about
| helping to fix this are urged to join the appropriate working group
| within their national standards body, which in the U.S. is ANSI X3V1.
| I'm sure that your participation would be happily accepted.

As the XML spec says in relevant part:

  Users may extend the ISO 10646 character repertoire, in the rare cases
  where this is necessary, by making use of the private use areas.

(admitting that this is at times necessary), and as the Unicode Standard
2.0 says flatly that it defines no way to do so, I think that Jon's
response is inadequate.  XML must either define a way to use the
private use area(s?), or say that a future version of the spec will
do so, or say that users must make private agreements to do so.  Or
rule out use of the private use area for the Internet (which is effectively 
the case now).  

And if it is truly contemplated that the private use area (rather than
SDATA entities) are to be used for the purpose under discussion, doesn't
the EBNF need to reflect that?

And is the spec still available at textuality.com?  Last time
I looked that version was more up to date than the one at the W3C,
yet now I can't find it.

[.sig spelling correction thanks to Ken Holman]


Regards,
    Terry Allen    Fujitsu Software Corp.    tallen@fsc.fujitsu.com
"In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
 which we soon find outselves obliged to destroy?" - Benjamin Franklin
  A Davenport Group Sponsor:  http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html

Received on Tuesday, 10 December 1996 19:22:51 UTC