A discussion on www-tag starting at

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jan/0019

developed into some interesting discourse on what a next rev of XML might look like. Following on this, a thought experiment named XML-SW appears at

http://www.textuality.com/xml/xmlSW.html

XML-SW = XML 1.0 2nd ed. - DTDs (and therefore entities) + namespaces + xml:base + the infoset.

Pulling it together took maybe a day all told, mostly sitting in airplanes. It was immensely enjoyable, and from a purely rhetorical/tutorial/stylistic point of view, I think XML-SW works better than most of its component parts (with the possible exception of xml:base, a remarkably graceful piece of work). Among other things:

All the endless circumlocutions around parameter entities: gone. "For interoperability": gone. The attribute value normalization and line-end handling migrate into the infoset, where they belong. xml:base goes with xml:lang and xml:space into a section about reserved attributes. Namespaces go into the discussion of elements and attributes, where they belong. "standalone=": gone. There's a nice "other markup" section for comments, PIs, and a vestigial doctype declaration. The vestigial doctype is defined purely syntactically and has no internal subset - a low-cost way to let people do DTD validation with XML 1.0 processors. The conformance section has real content, including the error-handling, which has migrated out of its awkward home in the definitions list. All the links out of infoset and namespaces are internal.

There are a million stylistic cleanups, ranging from bookkeeping - all example URIs are from example.com - to the excision of rhetorical tumors - there is no discussion of the relationship of namespaces to sets.

Aside from the massive change in losing DTDs & entities, I hope there are no other normative or semantic changes between XML-SW and the specs that went into it. If there are, that's a bug. The temptation to introduce JUST A FEW little obvious improvements that nobody could possibly disagree with is overwhelming, but that is a slippery slope leading into the most noisome of ratholes. Put another way, data and software that conform to XML-SW, aside from the difficult question of what goes in <?xml version="?", should in all respects conform to all the W3C recommendations that went into it.

One or two people have favored me with feedback and suggestions; they have my thanks but I won't mention their names here, as nobody so far - not even me - has taken the stand that this is a good idea.

Unfinished work: - roll in the improved character and name definitions from Blueberry. - link-check; there are almost certainly a few broken links - Turn XML-SW into an XML-SW document; currently it has an internal subset and the XSLT formatter relies on ID attributes. Then again, the first few drafts of the XML spec were actually SGML.

-Tim