discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Henri Sivonen <hsivonen AT iki.fi>]

On Dec 31, 2005, at 00:52, Carol Spears wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 12:04:15AM +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > I can't recall what the normative text says about HTML, but as far as
> > XHTML goes, the XML spec allows XML Processors not to pass comments
> > to the application. Since comments are not safe for software
> > consumption, putting metadata in comments is a bad idea.
> can you expand on this?

"They [comments] are not part of the document's character data; an  
XML processor MAY, but need not, make it possible for an application  
to retrieve the text of comments."
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-comments

Clearly, the purpose of XML comments is to be readable by humans who  
view the source of an XML document. Comments are not supposed to have  
significance for software processing.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen AT iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/