- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 16:28:32 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
- CC: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
[Paul Prescod:] | > The number of people who are familiar with *anything* now is | > insignificant compared to the number of people who will be working | > with these languages five years from now. | | If current trends continue, the majority of them will be English | speakers, though not necessarily native English speakers. Your estimate of the future proportion of non-English-speaking Internet users differs significantly from mine. | Anyhow, five years from now is a LONG TIME. What do we know about five | years from now: do they still edit XML text by hand? Yes. | Do they still use a few, standard DTDs, written in English? No. | Do people write their own DTDs in their own languages They invent tags in their own languages. Most of them don't know what a DTD is and don't care. | but continue to use the < and > conventions because they are so | universal? Depends on what we decide. | Did Unicode actually take off? If it didn't, we're toast. The XML character set is based on the assumption that Unicode takes off. | Are programmers the only people who see "raw" XML code? No. But with few exceptions they will be the only ones who need to put in a character entity by hand. Jon
Received on Thursday, 13 March 1997 19:28:43 UTC