-----Original Message-----
From:   Rick JELLIFFE [SMTP:ricko@g...]
Sent:   Friday, November 10, 2000 3:40 PM
To:     xml-dev@l...
Subject:        Re: Dangers of Subsetting? (was RE: Pull-based XML parsers?)

No-one has said Common XML (as a data format) is dangerous.
I said that developers should boycott parsers that call themselves
XML but only implement a subset except for specific-purpose systems:
so you it is fine to make a subset parser (e.g. for SOAP) and
say "this is a parser for a subset of XML" but it is not fine to
say "this is an XML parser".

 
This makes perfect sense to me.  I'm sorry if I misunderstood the original "boycott" post (I guess I thought it was clear that kXML just claimed to implement "Common XML", but let's not reopen old wounds).

 And thanks for the explanation of ISO 8859 Annex K -- I guess if anyone gets really serious about promoting  "Common XML Core" or "MinML", it would make sense to define it in the official Annex K manner first.

One issue that generated a lot of traffic on this list a year ago was whether XML needed a similar mechanism with which one could define a "profile" (as Len Bullard used the term it in http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200011/msg00176.html) that constrained the types of markup to be used in a class of  XML applications (e.g., "no PIs, notations, parsed entities or CDATA sections, please" - perhaps if the format needs to be "Desperate Perl Hacker Friendly"). Isn't this more or less what Annex K allows? Would the people who so vigorously oppose defining "subsets of XML" in the name of interoperability be averse to adding a mechanism like this in a future version of XML?