Re: XML 1.0 priorities

>SD1 (short tags).  This is trivial for parser writers, but I am no longer in
>favour of it because (a) I suspect some XML documents will be hand-authored
>(or at least hand-edited) - a rich source of confusion - and (b) error
>recovery for missing endtags in WF documents would be effectively error
>creation.

Right. Having short tags will complicate error detection and
recovery... it will add one more reason for requiring a DTD. 

>SD3 (Data types).  I don't think there are syntactic problems here, although
>I suspect the namespace of potential types is sufficiently large that we 
>would debate for some time.  (Date?, Date+Time?, DateTime?, etc. and there
>will also have to be discussion about floats - precision, overflow behaviour,
>format specification, etc.)  I wouldn't object to a placeholder and make as 
>much progress as possible.

Right. You also run into a large number of I18N issues. I have no
objection to defining an application profile for types, but would
object to having it in the parser. Havin an application profile would
require the definition of some way of hooking a notation validator
into the processing stream.

Received on Monday, 19 May 1997 09:05:32 UTC