[relax-ng] Agenda RELAX NG telcon 11th April

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

Note that the US has started daylight savings time.  I believe this means 
that for those of use in countries with daylight savings time, the telcon 
will start an hour earlier.  (For US participants, the local time of the 
telcon will be unchanged.)

This week, I would like to see if we can make some progress on compact 
syntax issues.

1. Local namespace declarations.  I don't think we are ready to select a 
syntax, but let's try and decide whther we need this feature or not.

2. String literals and escaping.

(a) Character escapes.  There seems to be some consensus for a \x{NNN} 
syntax.  Do we want to allow this everywhere or just in string literals? 
If everywhere, what happens if the user does

  "\x{22}"

(0x22 is the code for ")?  What happens if the user does

# a comment with \x{A} in it

?

(b) Long string literals/escaping literal delimiters. Do we need to support 
breaking up a string literal over multiple lines? Do we want to keep the 
doubling mechanism as a way of getting a "/' inside a "/'-delimited string? 
One possible solution to both problems is to allow multiple adjacent string 
literals with an implicit concatenation semantic.  If we don't adopt this, 
do we need to do something about the fact that both

 a:foo [ "x" "y" ]

and

 a:foo { "x""y" ]

are legal but have different meanings?

(c) Literal newlines in strings.  Should these continue to be allowed or 
should we require \x{A} instead?

3. Encoding declaration.  Do we need one or can we manage with 
UTF-8+UTF-16+externally specified encodings?  How can we avoid adding a lot 
of complexity to the specification to handle this?

4. Syntax for a:documentation/<div>.

(a) a:documentation. What would be the status of the proposed ## syntax? 
Would it be in the grammar or an extra-grammatical convention?  What about 
comments on <div>s?

(b) What syntax do we want for <div? Possibilities are

- bare braces with a required annotation preceding it or

- div { ... }

James