Re: PIs and RE handling

At 11:45 96/09/12 +0000, (James Clark) wrote:
>
>> From: Charles@SGMLsource.com (Charles F. Goldfarb)
>> Cc: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
>> Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 10:14:43 GMT
>> 
>...
>I certainly wouldn't advocate using comments to do what PIs do.  But I
>might advocate using elements to do what PIs do, and introducing some
>DTD feature to allow convenient specification of elements that can
>occur anywhere (without the special RE treatment that 8879 gives to
>inclusions).
>
That new kind of element is not now in 8879. Backward compatibility means
that new use can't break the old, but possibly just invoking a warning.
>
>> If the
>> objective is DTDless parsing, the real problem isn't PIs but included
>> subelements. Without the DTD, there is no way to distinguish them from proper
>> subelements.
>
>I would hope XML wouldn't have inclusions (at least not as they are in
>8879).

Agreed. I would retain exclusion exceptions.

>
>> The net is that this is really a problem with RE handling, not with PIs
per se. 
>
>...
>So one might argue that the problem is really mixed content, and that
>the solution is to restrict it, by, for example, saying that elements
>either
>
>- have element content, in which PI, comments and so on would also be
>allowed or
>
>- have PCDATA content in which elements, PIs, comments are not
>allowed
>
>but they can't mix PCDATA with elements, PIs or comments in a single
>element.
>
I like that recommendation.
Without inclusions and mixed content, doesn't PCDATA become a "fixed" RCDATA, 
where the proper matching endtag closes it, not just any ETAGO?

>James
>
Regards/Harvey

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 17:48:48 UTC