Comment on XML 1.0 5th edition

Hi XML Core Working Group,

While I understand and appreciate the fact that anyone should be able to
use its own language to name XML elements and attributes, I think that
XML 1.0 5th edition fails to fix one of the issues raised by XML 1.1.

It seems to me that by also changing the name production used by
ID/IDREF/IDREFs in DTDs XML 1.0 5th edition can cause incompatibility
issues since documents that are invalid per XML 1.0 4th edition can
become valid per XML 1.0 5th edition.

This is true for DTD validation, but this is also disruptive for other
XML validation languages including W3C XML Schema.

W3C XML Schema part 2 happens to be slightly inconsistent in regard of
the way it makes reference to other specifications.

The xs:name datatype is defined  with a specific reference to XML 1.0
2nd edition: "The ·lexical space· of Name is the set of all strings
which ·match· the Name production of [XML 1.0 (Second Edition)]."

That means that xs:name should not be affected for XML 1.0 5th edition.

On the contrary, other datatypes such as QName, NCName, ID, IDREF,
IDREFS make reference to namespaces in XML 1.0: "
Namespaces in XML World Wide Web Consortium. Namespaces in XML.
Available at:http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/" and
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/ makes reference to "
XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, eds. Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, and
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. 10 February 1998. Available at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml." which is the latest version of XML 1.0.

These other datatypes would thus all be affected by XML 1.0 5th edition
meaning that they wouldn't be consistent with xs:name and also that XML
documents invalid per a schema with XML 1.0 4th edition can become valid
in XML 1.0 5th edition.

The fact that the same document might become valid or not depending on
the edition of XML being supported or not is an issue that needs to be
addressed IMO.

And this issue is different from the fact that a document that is not
well formed in XML 1.0 4th edition might become well formed in XML 1.0
5th edition: in the first case, applications designed to support a
specific vocabulary will be affected while the second case affects
applications designed to be generic and support ad-hoc XML documents.

Eric
-- 
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If you have a XML document, you have its schema.
                                                  http://examplotron.org
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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