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> > Even though this is the path travelled by all of the things > that the HTML 5 folks are now including (well, apart from > video: maybe instead of trying to work it out in committee, a > distributed mechanism would lead to a solution there as > well?), the working group seems to regard the idea of > distributed authority antipathetically (or even to be > forthrightly hostile to the idea). So long as HTML is just a document format it will always suffer this problem: the browser is a bottleneck for innovation, and nothing happens until you can get the owners of the browsers to agree to make it happen. That's a profoundly undesirable state of affairs. > > (Mind you, I'm not suggesting that XML is free of "we must control" > attitudes; see, for instance, W3C XML Schema, in which the > collection of primitive types are all you get, unless you can > convince the Schema WG to add *your* favorite unrelated > primitive datatype to the collection). > XML Schema 1.1 permits vendor-defined data types, and if the vendors choose to provide mechanisms for defining them, user-defined data types. Saxon 9.2 makes a small start with facilities that allow you to define your own lexical representations of existing types, e.g. 1,234 for integers, on|off for booleans, or 25/8/2009 for dates. Of course, such things only become really useful when the mechanisms for defining the extensions are standardised across products: but I'm a great believer in the principle of providing extensibility first, and then standardising the extensions (or preferably, the extensibility mechanisms) that prove popular. It's like waiting to see where people want to walk before you lay the footpaths. Regards, Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/ http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
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