Dave Pawson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 21:23 +0900, Michael Smith wrote: > > > When some tool developers add support for it and others don't, > > users start asking, "Hey, when I use tool X (which supports the > > PI), things work the way I expect, but when I use tool Y (which > > does not support the PI), things don't work the way I expect." > > Your antagonism to this idea is exceeding strong Mike. > Is there something else?
Nothing else. I simply do not think it is a good idea. And one thing in particular I find a little worrisome about the idea is that some people on the list have expressed only reluctant/skeptical/guarded support for it. It seems to me that kind of reluctant agreement is what ends up giving us specs like the W3 XML Schema recommendation. I remember one of James Clark's early comments about the W3 XML Schema rec being something along the lines that he could not understand how 40+ extremely capable people could get together and produce such a "disaster" of a specification. I do not know how it happened in that particular case, but I would speculate that in part at least it may have been the result of some people reluctantly agreeing to things. > The prime purpose seems to be to coalesce common usage > using something an XML processor can happily ignore. The current state of things as far as I can see is that we have two RELAX NG-aware editing applications that have support for a PI of this type. As far as I know, none of the other existing RELAX NG-aware editing applications support such a PI, and there are at least two (XML Buddy and nXML) that I think we can say (given the public comments of their developers) will never support such a PI. So I don't think that what we would end up with by publishing a standard for a schema-association PI could ever be described as "common usage". Because users will find that some tools support it while others don't. And I cannot buy the argument that because some editing applications have already implemented support for a PI of this type, but using a different name and syntax for it, we now ought to go ahead and agree on a common name and syntax. I would personally much rather see those editing applications de-support the existing PIs. > I see no harm, and benefits, not least of which > is avoiding annoying users. I see harm. And as far as the benefits, I think we really ought to instead try to come up with with a standard mechanism that provides the same benefits without requiring an explicit schema location to be specified in individual document instances. --Mike
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