RE: some ERB decisions REF: A.20 Comments

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 16:55:33 -0400 Ken Holman said:
>I could not tell from the post if that which is said about A.20 is a
>consensus decision or an unresolved issue.
>
>> ...
>>    A.20 XML will retain the notion and syntax of comments (= 8879's
>>    'comment declarations') (7.6, 10.3), but comment declarations
>>    will contain at most one comment:  comments will take the form
>>    '<!>' or else will begin with '<!--' and end with '-->' (no
>>    space allowed), and may not contain '--'.
>>
>>Comments will take the form '<!--' ... '-->', no internal '--'
>>is allowed and no white space between the final '--' and the
>>final '>'.
>>
>>Empty comments (<!>) will not be allowed in XML.
>
>If this issue is still open as unresolved, I find that the empty comment
>is very useful and I feel that it should be retained.

Sorry for the confusion.  Both of the flush-left paragraphs are reports
of decisions:  <!-- ... --> is in and <!> is out.

The motive for omitting <!> was that its most frequent function, namely
the escaping of delimiters (e.g. to type an SGML example showing the use
of the <<!>p> tag and the <<!>/p> tag) is no longer applicable since <
and & are always recognized as delimiters in XML unless escaped by &lt;
and &amp;.  Its other uses (escaping record ends and decoration in a
simple ASCII-art style are those that come to my mind) were not felt
critical enough to justify retaining it and its attendant complications
to the grammar of XML.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 19:48:15 UTC