[xliff] thread on the future of processing instructions in XML

["Friedman, Eric" <eric@ConveySoftware.com>]

In today's meeting, I mentioned a thread on the XML discussion group in
which strong sentiment for abolishing processing instructions in future
versions of XML was voiced.  Here's an excerpt of Tim Berners-Lee's posting
on the topic (note that he took pains to flag this as a personal opinion).  

This is obviously in the early stages and may never come to a head, but
given that PIs are part of the 1.0 specification, we may want to contemplate
alternatives for the 1.1 work.

"PIs are indeed "useful in practice".  However, I feel they are harmful
because they bypasss all the extensibility power one has with namespaces
to make well-defined extentsions.

"PIs also add a barnacle onto the XML syntax which it really doesn't
need.

[...]

"I would agree with David and hope that PIs would be eliminated as soon as
possible."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Feb/0057.html