New features for xerces-c 4.0.0?

Hello,

I notice there is some work towards a 4.0.0 version. Can you point me
to features that you are planning for this release? Since XML has been
losing its momentum for years, I suggest the next release to be truly
innovative and helpful for developers to justify the major version
step. This is my wishlist:
- First citizen support for UTF-8 as internal encoding: to my
knowledge xerces-c supports only UTF-16 as internal encoding, which it
was a good choice in the 90s. Today some frameworks are moving
internal string encoding to UTF-8, meaning that using xerces-c will
always require expensive bi-directional conversions. Notable
frameworks are Swift[1] (NSString should already support utf-8 storage
when interoping with Objective-C and c++) and qt6 may choose to also
have utf-8 storage in QString. xerces-c could be worked on so XMLCh
maps to char or char8_t (C++20), intending an internal utf-8 encoding;
- A non cached, forward-only parser API (also called a pull parser
API) similar to XmlReader[2]: to my knowledge xerces-c still doesn't
have it, while libxml2 wisely implemented it a long time ago[3]. A
pull parser API is intended to be more resource efficient and easier
to use than event based SAX API, possibly being just a little bit more
verbose.

Cheers,
Francesco

[1] https://swift.org/blog/utf8-string/
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.xml.xmlreader
[3] http://www.xmlsoft.org/xmlreader.html