XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: David Megginson <david at megginson.com
>SGML does nothing that XML cannot do.

I don't know how Dave can say that.

For example, many asian documents use user-defined characters (East
Asian character sets have a special code space reserved for these, and
East Asian word processing applications come bundled with font editors
to allow definition of user-defined characters).

In SGML I can short-reference these codepoints to entity which points to
the appropriate glyphs and which has other data attributes to describe
character properties.

In XML, to do this I have to write a special program to simulate this
behaviour.

And if the program just inserts elements rather than entity references
(because XML has no attributes on entities, so I have to use elements),
my element structure is made more complicated.

Furthermore I cannot use elements inside attribute values, while I can
use entity references. The lack of this kind in XML has closed off the
obvious and simple solution to private-use area (PUA) characters: East
Asians and MathML could each have found it useful.

Rick Jelliffe


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