Historically this first surfaced from a proposal (I think) by Tim Bray -
XML-TYPE (listed in XML-DEV), but became subsumed in XML-DATA. I would be
pleased to see progress made along those lines, but don't want to have to
implement the whole of the current draft for my purposes (numeric values in
technical documents). In the same way as XLL has split into xptr and xlink,
it could make sense to split XML-data into the primitive types and the
structural part.
IMO the primitive types would be very heavily re-used in XML applications
and would prevent a fragmentation where everyone ends up defining FLOAT and
so on in very slightly different incompatible ways. Now that we have (or
will have) namespaces to separate these from everything else there should
be nothing to stop this. It would be the most widely used re-usable set of
XML information objects.
[If this is already part of a formal W3C activity with milestones, please
forgive my ignorance and lead me to it.]
P.
Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg