It's kind of a shame; I thought we had surpassed some of the out-moded concepts of SGML a few years ago. SGML surpassed the 256 character attribute limit of GML with 1023, so, I had thought XML/HTML would have evolved beyond that. If nothing else, LITLEN should have been made declarable with the 2000 standard (actually, I think it should have been 1998-2 standard).
At either point, for better or worse, many html readers can take in much larger encoding than the universal length (I think for the better as the current length is over a decade of its own age). Let the Standardization Holy Wars begin!
