The publication of the Blueberry requirements caused
a great deal of debate during the summer. The requirements are aimed at
removing some limitations facing users wanting to produce fully native markup, by extending the allowable range of XML name characters; allowing
NEL as a legal line end character was also included to make life easier for some IBM mainframe users.
The debate raged
between those who believed Blueberry offered marginal benefits, and those who considered full Unicode
support to be a requirement for fully internationalized markup. Many also expressed the desire to see
the changes incorporate more substantial features.
The XML 1.1 Working Draft is essentially a list of changes to
the XML 1.0 specification. A new version number has been specified, rather than issuing a 'third edition' because
the changes affect the basic definition of well-formedness. Any Unicode character not expressly forbidden
is now permitted as part of a name, opening the door for many
weird and wonderful tag names.
The publication announcement on the XML-DEV
mailing was met with less than a fanfare, and even faced derision from some contributors. Rick Jelliffe invited people to
just ignore it:
I see XML 1.1 is out, and it is so crazy that it is funny. My considered
recommendation is we all have a good laugh, and then forget about it.
By allowing any character in names, it means that we can have WF XML 1.1
documents which merely opening in a text editor (even an editor for the
document encoding) will corrupt with a well-formedness error: if people use
characters in names which may be split at by automated line-wrapping. A
markup language which safe practise is to *never* open an entity in a text
editor? Excellent advance!
Michael Kay expressed disappointment that XML 1.1 won't bring XML Namespaces
into the core specification:
...since all the other important specs like InfoSet and XPath now work only with
namespace-conformant documents, it seems rather pointless to introduce an
XML 1.1 that not only continues to allow documents that aren't namespace
conformant, but even (as far as I can see) retains the timid "please don't
misuse the colon" wording of XML 1.0 second edition.
These comments show that earlier doubts about the worth of XML 1.1, particularly
it's limited scope, are still prevalent. It seems certain that another lengthy round
of debate will ensue.