RE: validator disparity

> I'm a bit surprised this issue remains unresolved

Me too.

, since one 
> obvious solution is to simply adopt any of the conventions 
> prevailing in perl, shell, or whatever and call it good.

I've generally found that in corner cases of regular expressions the only
way to find out what Perl (or Java, or .NET...) does is to [expletive deleted] it and see,
which is time-consuming, and sometimes not even enlightening - I've
completely failed, for example, to discover exactly how the "i" flag
(case-blindness) works by this method. Most of these languages are amazingly
informal in their specification of regexes.
  
> It's hardly a question that should require re-engineering 
> anew and seems well-suited to a "Pick One and Move On" 
> resolution.  Shouldn't several of the "right people" be able 
> to quickly sort this out over a cold beer?  :)

Yes, I don't know why it's been allowed to fester for so long. I think it's
simply that the schema WG has a very long queue of issues, many of which
require an hour's discussion to resolve; there also seems to have been a
conscious decision to ensure that time is allocated to feature development
alongside maintenance.

Michael Kay