[SML] Preliminary EBNF for SML

[Joe Lapp]

I agree with David.  If SML doesn't support the full gamut of encodings, it's useless to us.  I'm very much a supporter of a simplified XML, but our business is international.  It's one thing to promote a simplified syntax for ecommerce and quite another to promote a standard (spoken) language.  (BTW, I'm not sure any business would buy that convert-to/from-English argument.)

And let's please do dump attributes.  We can save the world countless hours of time wasted in philosophical discussion and in trying (and largely failing) to produce technologies that make first class citizens of both attribute values and element content.  It would be nice to make the issue moot for SML.

Also, your XML won't quite be a subset unless you disallow ']]>' from content.  Don't know why this was ever disallowed in XML; it should only have been disallowed in CDATA sections.

At 12:40 PM 11/26/1999 +0000, David Carlisle wrote:
>
>
>Name ::= NameStart (NameChar)*
>NameStart ::= [a-zA-Z] | '_' | ':'
>NameChar ::= NameStart | [0-9] | '.' | '-'
>
>Given all the work that's currently going on to internationalise the web
>(and computing in general) and remove historic English bias, is it
>really politically or culturally acceptable to restrict element names to
>the English alphabet? If SML is only for English you could restrict the
>character data to be ascii as well to save on processing utf8
>characters.  If it isn't only for English then the above would
>presumably be one of many SML, SML-EN, and you would expect to see
>similar variants allowing element names in French or Russian, or
>Japanese?
>
>David
>
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--
Joe Lapp              (Looking for some good people to help design
Senior Engineer        and build the Internet's business-to-business
webMethods, Inc.       XML infrastructure.  We are 100% Java.)
jlapp at webMethods.com           http://www.webMethods.com

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