There are two other principles which, while they don't appear in this list as design goals, continually surfaced during the XML discussion. The first was that of internationalization. It was an inexcusable oversight to miss this in the list above. We bent over backward to make XML work properly in all the world's scripts, with a fair degree of success.
The second undeclared design principle is embodied in the acronym "DPH". This stands for "Desperate Perl Hacker" - the luckless subordinate who is informed that some global change is required in a large, complex document inventory at short notice, and who is able to deliver by applying a scripting facility such as perl to cleanly-structured data such as XML.
Copyright © 1998, Tim Bray. All rights reserved.