The W3C's day of shame

On November 26th the W3C brought disgrace upon themselves by publishing an eyes-wide-open deliberate lie - the so-called "Fifth Edition" of XML 1.0.

This is actually a new version of XML, masquerading as 1.0. Most other W3C recommendations that refer to XML 1.0 are now automatically non-conforming, including XML Namespaces! After protesting loudly (as you might expect) at this breach of trust for some months, I resigned my membership of the XSL working group.

The practical effects on Eiffel programmers are:

1) The Gobo XML parser is now officially non-conformant. In fact, it is impossible to make it (or any other XML parser, for that matter) conformant, until the W3C trash the XML Namespaces recommendation (and others) as well.

2) You are liable to encounter in the not-too-distant future, files self-describing themselves as XML 1.0, which will not parse.

3) I have abandoned all work on the Gobo XPath and XSLT libraries, as there is no point in trying to conform to a recommendation that is liable to change its meaning at a moments notice. (And since it too relies on the XML 1.0 definition, it is actually impossible to conform to the XSLT 2.0 recommendation at the moment).