[XML-SIG] IPC7 results

[A.M. Kuchling]

The XML-SIG session at IPC7 produced good results, giving us a future
direction to move in. The issues I wanted to discuss were:

	1) Anything need to be dropped from the package before 1.0?
	2) Anything need to be added to the package before we can call 
it 1.0?
	3) What to do about Unicode?
	4) What do we do after 1.0?

The near-term actions will be:

	* Lobby for adding sgmlop.c to 1.5.2, because it's generally
useful and will remove some redundancy from the XML package.

	* Two critical issues for version 1.0 of the XML package are
namespaces and Unicode. For Unicode support, we're going to include a
Unicode type in the XML package, probably Martin von Löwis's wstring
module. Namespace support will probably be added as an extension to
SAX and the DOM interface; we'll have to discuss what this should look
like.

	* More demos should be added that aren't small toy applications. 

	* For interoperability, people want to be able to marshal
Python data structures into XML. My misgivings about which DTD to
support were answered by the response: "Support them all."

	* The XML package will be divided into a base and extension
package.  What we currently have will go into the base package; it'll
be the minimal requirement for XML processing. The extension package
will include higher-level stuff, such as code for any DTD we deem
significant, XSL, XLink, and other things.

The discussion about post-1.0 didn't produce any definite results, so
we'll worry about that when the time comes.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
A pig can learn more tricks than a dog, but has too much sense to want to do
it.
    -- Robertson Davies, _The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks_