Re: Doing Markup in Plain Text: A Modest Proposal for Planes 4-B of Unicode

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 31 2004 - 17:38:15 EST

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    From: <jcowan@reutershealth.com>

    > XML has become the de facto standard for fancy text. It is therefore
    > useful to explore ways and means of bringing XML into plain text,
    > since obviously plain text is simpler than, and superior to, fancy text.
    > The current method involving & and < and > and / and who knows what else
    > is obviously much too complicated, and cannot interoperate with even the
    > simplest plain text. Fortunately, the characters in planes 4 through
    > B can come to our rescue.

    Is it a joke? XML does not need it, and if something is expected it's possibly a
    structured binary representation of XML for easier processing with simplicied
    parsers.

    Your "proposal" also ignores the current developement of XML with namespaces and
    parsed entities resolved according to interchangeable schemas... (these last can
    be described in a structured binary representation, by respecting the XML
    document InfoSet, but until there's a need and formal definition for use in XML
    RPC services, I see no usage for such obscure encoding in planes 4 to 11
    (because such encoding is unparsable, notably for document validation and
    reusability with non colliding namespaces)... Thanks the current text-based XML
    syntax offers much more flexibility than what you propose here, which could lead
    to new flaws (probably even more than with the current syntax supported by
    existing XML parser implementations), including at the security level (think
    about how you would break XML Signatures)...



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