Re: Marked Sections

> At 06:48 PM 9/10/96 +0100, Martin Bryan wrote:
> 
> >10.4
> >Marked sections are useful in DTDs (a la HTML and TEI) but it might be valid
> >to ban them within transmitted document instances conforming to XML. (XML
> >should really be for the transmission of version independent documents.
> >RCDATA should have its entities resolved before tranmission and with CDATA
> >should have any embedded markup delimiters replaced by character references.)
> 
> There's been no discussion of this, and early voting results do not show a
> trend.  Marked sections clearly complicate parser construction, and I don't
> think they are useful enough to make up for this and get into XML.

On the contrary, I think they are very necessary in DTDs. I try to avoid
them, but the inconsistencies in the current crop of tools force me to
use them. XML is not going to be able improve this situation in the least.
Tools will still have their quirks and many of those quirks will require
some subtle change to the DTD in order to compensate for them. Variations
on table models and equation markup are two such examples of things that
XML will not address and will continue to be a problem in the future.

Robert Streich			streich@slb.com
Schlumberger			512-331-3318 (voice)
Austin Research			512-331-3760 (fax)

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 12:16:20 UTC