Re: SHORTTAG

At 01:13 PM 09/11/96 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>The big problem here is the TEI, which makes heavy use of the minimized
>attribute formulation.  But supporting SHORTTAG flies in the face of our
>design goal of being able to do useful processing of XML docs without having
>the DTD.  The things that are TEI-encoded are already in SGML and
>thus probably aren't crying out for XML - I suspect that following the advent
>of XML, there will be a pretty neat & tidy XML-compliant TEI subset (right,
>Michael and Lou?).
>
>I think all forms of SHORTTAG complicate parsing, don't add enough, and
>should be dropped in XML.

Well, I mostly agree -- but I think the grammar should allow unquoted tokens
for values (which, as Martin pointed out, is technically part of SHORTTAG in
SGML).

Also, if we do end up providing some kind of partial DTD for dealing with EMPTY
and such, we could easily enough support attribute defaulting, which is the
other
part of SHORTTAG I think is useful on pragmatic (though not theoretical)
grounds.

All the rest of SHORTTAG can be lost: NET, <>, </>, <P<Q>, etc. Though of
course "</>" can be done without a DTD, and is not too hard to explain, so
I'd say it's the least objectionable of the remaining gadgets.

S

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 17:08:29 UTC