Re: RS/RE: basic questions

At 01:40 AM 10/3/96 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>At the other extreme, there could also be something like the old Macintosh
>convention, so that RS/RE is shortreffed to <p> or the paragraph tag (or
>"<>" even).  In otherwords, force RE/RS to have a definite meaning largely
>precluding its use willy-nilly inside mixed content elements. (It means
>that XML might have trouble in editors that handle wraparound by inserting
>linebreaks, but that would be bearable.)

I'm not convinced it is bearable. Most people editing by hand are likely to
encounter the wordbreak problem. If we aren't worried about wordbreak, I
made a compromise proposal yesterday that can be expressed in two lines:

#1. RE's are not signficant, except within verbatim elements <" "> (which
can only contain data content, no markup).

#2. RE's within verbatim elements ARE significant (i.e. the parser passes
them to the application).

The third rule is just to handle the word wrap problem:

#3. RE's between words (i.e not immediately following or preceding markup)
are significant.

There are two implied rules:

#1.Whitespace is always significant (which makes table formatting a pain,
but it's livable) 

#2.Those who want to always delimit their data are welcome to. Those that
don't want to don't have to.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 1996 15:44:01 UTC