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[Michael Champion] >The other approach would be to lobby the W3C for a clean way to define XML >feature profiles that applications could use to specify the contract between >producers and consumers of data -- not just the elements, attributes, and >values, but the other stuff such as acceptability of DTD internal subsets, >CDATA sections, PIs, and various namespace declaration configurations. This >would make the SOAP debate easy to resolve: just use whatever magic profile >string is required to tell the XML parser to treat DOCTYPE declarations and >PIs as errors, then we have interoperability across SOAP implementations and >between SOAP and generic XML implementations. I had a shot at this nearly two years ago now with XFM (XML Features Manifest) (http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0002.html). I'd love to see something done on these lines but I sense there are still too few people willing to talk about their interoperability problems in public. Maybe someday when the interoperability emperor sheds a few more clothes. My current favourite is the amount of XML I see flowing around the place with encoding="utf-8" in its XML declaration, even though the systems working with the data choke on anything other than seven bit or ISO Latin 1 characters. Doesn't anyone else out there have a requirement to be able to say "I am using UTF-8 but I promise you, I am only using Latin 1" or "only using Japanese" etc? Sean
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