Re: B.10 Empty elements?

A survey of the options:

<e></e> - easy to understand.  But of course then we can't retain the
          EMPTY 8879 declaration in XML, thus making XML<->SGML round-tripping
          difficult.  Also I agree that it looks like a place where data ought
          to be put.  Also, I think that XML ought to be able to deal with
          the following common formulation: <IMG SRC="x.gif">; call this
          HTML interoperability.

<@e> and <e/ -  Both of these are easy to understand, allow reasonable SGML
                interoperability, but make HTML interoperability impossible.

<e> - requires annoying extra markup declarations.  On the other hand,
      allows full SGML and HTML interoperability.  Also, it is A Good Thing 
      to make people start thinking about markup declarations.

I think that SGML and HTML interoperability are worth a whole lot of elegance
and cleverness.  So it's <e> for me.


Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 1996 13:02:05 UTC