14:04:54 RRSAgent has joined #ixml 14:04:58 logging to https://www.w3.org/2026/09/01-ixml-irc 14:05:16 Meeting: Invisible XML Community Group 14:05:16 Date: 1 September 2026 14:05:21 Chair: Norm 14:05:23 Scribe: Norm 14:05:37 Present: Bethan, Alan, David, John, Norm 14:05:42 Regrets: Steven 14:05:42 john has joined #ixml 14:05:47 rrsagent, draft minutes 14:05:49 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2026/09/01-ixml-minutes.html norm 14:05:54 rrsagent, set logs world visible 14:06:11 Topic: Symposium videos 14:06:27 Bethan: What copyright are we going to put on them? 14:06:44 John: Do we need permission from all the people? 14:06:55 Bethan: I don't know what the rules are. Do we want any kind of statement on the videos themselves? 14:07:12 ... If it's a less of a mine field to put nothing, I'm okay with that. 14:07:17 Alan: I'm not sure what else has been done. 14:07:35 Bethan: I'd be tempted to put a restrictive copyright on them so that if you want to do anything else, you have to ask. 14:07:44 Norm: Who would they ask? 14:07:55 Bethan: The iXML symposium mailing list? 14:08:02 John: What did Declarative Amsterdam do? 14:08:24 Norm: When I asked where we should put them, the Internet Archive was suggested. 14:08:29 Alan: That would be good. 14:08:46 Alan: They also host The Prisoner. 14:10:14 John: A cursory glance at the Declarative Amsterdam videos doesn't reveal a copyright statement. 14:10:48 Norm: I'd leave it off, but if you have any ideas, send it to the list? 14:11:06 Some discussion of copyright and AI scrapers and the like. 14:12:40 Topic: Add symbol for "epsilon"? 14:12:50 Bethan: What's the state of play? 14:12:54 John: I don't know. 14:13:03 Norm: I'm persuaded by the arguments for "". 14:13:31 Some discussion of how many empty strings can fit in a string. 14:15:02 Norm repeats his remarks about whitespace inside () or not. 14:15:19 Bethan: I've come around to the idea of "" *and* some kind of epsilon symbol that is not a string. 14:15:27 Alan: The emails are wearing you down! 14:17:20 Norm: If you have something that's easy to type on a US ASCII keyboard, does that mean the other symbol doesn't have to be easy to type? 14:17:48 Bethan: Relistening to some of the videos, Elisa and her students were talking about how to match "." (in the regular expression sense). 14:18:43 ... I think ~[] is one of the most hostile bits of design I've ever encountered. 14:19:10 ... I think matching "." is something that people want to do and we should have something that's more approachable and user friendly. 14:19:33 ... If we're going to make a change for epsilon that's backwards incompatible, we should give ourselves the freedom to review other syntactic choices. 14:19:39 ... Can we make the language easier to use? 14:19:54 John: We'd still be keeping the complement of a character set. 14:19:59 Bethan: Yes, but not the empty one! 14:20:31 John: The backwards incompatibilities are new symbols for epsilon and any character. 14:20:49 ... The backwards incompatibility would be that they wouldn't work on an older implementation. 14:21:00 Bethan: We'd also be forbidding (). 14:21:38 s/()/an empty alt. 14:22:00 Bethan: I think if () creates an alt, the alt should still contain the empty string, it shouldn't be literally empty in the XML representation. 14:22:32 Some discussion of the semantic distinctions between "nothing" and "the empty string'. 14:23:27 Norm: We should encourage people to think about the grammar in ways that are correct about how grammars work! 14:23:41 Bethan: I think we should also talk about what it means when the input is not recognized by the grammar. 14:23:47 ... I've been persuaded that that should be an error. 14:24:28 Some discussion of the distinction between "old parsers don't recognize new grammars" and "new parsers don't recognize old grammars" 14:24:47 Alan: We could put a version in there so that new processors could understand the old grammar. 14:28:48 Some discussion of version numbers vis-a-vis modularity and pragmas and such. 14:29:29 rrsagent, draft minutes 14:29:30 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2026/09/01-ixml-minutes.html norm 14:31:01 Topic: Next meeting 14:31:34 15 September? 14:31:39 Alan gives regrets. 14:31:50 Some discussion of when XML Summer School occurs. 14:32:09 We'll move to 29 September if we have too many regrets for 15 September. 14:32:21 rrsagent, draft minutes 14:32:22 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2026/09/01-ixml-minutes.html norm