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> -----Original Message----- > From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@a...] > > > For documentation, Derek cites (in his order significant or not): > > > > 1. Allowed characters > > Hi! I don't think Derek's stated comments on allowed characters > are correct. > > He says that XML only allows letters and digits in names, which > is not so. He says that there have been lots of Asian characters > missed out, which is not so. I over simplified my description of what characters are allowed in names, agreed. I have been told by some of our customer reps that the allowed character range for names has been a blocking issue for some Asian customer. It may be that it is only one key character which is causing the problem, or it may be an entire class of characters. I only know that it is blocking customer adoption. > And he says that XML required > checking for correct surrogate pairs, which is not so. XML 1.0 had surrogate pairs. The Unicode 2.0 code-point space was 32-bit. It might be better to argue that surrogate checking is a side effect of the lamentable decision by Microsoft (and others.. java for example) to choose UTF-16 as their primary encoding for Unicode characters. > As another matter, Derek mentions spurious whitespace nodes. But if > using a DTD (and validating parser) these nodes will not > be generated. So it is not a problem with XML, but a trade-off > you get with using simple XML. Indeed, even with no-DTD XML, people > can avoid spurious whitespace nodes simply by not autoindenting > their generated XML. XML Schemas and RELAX NG also provide > enough information that a vendor could use to configure their > XML processors to strip out insignificant whitespace. While true, I find that significant portion of my customers do not use DTD/XSD/Relax-NG, and have no real desire to introduce that extra complexity. If we could have made it easier to indicate when whitespace was ignorable for no-DTD XML, these customers would have had fewer problems. -derek
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