Re: 8879 changes?

[Karl Best:]

| A small number of items in the XML rely upon changes to be made in the
| 8879 SGML standard, reportedly in a technical corrigendum. I'm
| supposing that these proposals are to be discussed at the upcoming WG8
| meeting in Barcelona.

Right.

| Would anyone care to comment on the status of these changes, who will
| be championing them in Barcelona, and the likelihood of their being
| accepted? (And, can we write our congressman to throw our support
| behind the changes?)

There is general consensus on the changes that we actually need for
XML (for example, allowing overlapping enumerated attribute values, so
that you can use "YES" as a value for more than one enumerated
attribute, and allowing attributes on an element type to be specified
in more than one place).  The uncontroversial nature of these changes
was what emboldened us to assume them for purposes of the latest
draft.  WG8 may see the corrigendum as an opportunity to make
additional changes beyond those needed for XML if general agreement
can be found for them; it's this part that's still undecided.  So
there won't be an actual TC for you to look at until after the meeting
in Barcelona.  Charles Goldfarb has been carrying the ball on this and
doing a mighty fine job of it.

The main thing people can do to support the TC is to participate in
the national body that corresponds to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 in their
country (in the U.S. this is NCITS V1) and vote in favor of the TC
when it comes up for national body approval.

Jon

Received on Saturday, 19 April 1997 12:38:38 UTC