Re: More on RE/RS

On Mon, 30 Sep 96 01:03:02 CDT, Robert Streich <streich@slb.com> wrote:

>At 12:52 PM 9/27/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:
>>I think a lot of the RS/RE trouble comes from confusion between the
>>representation and that which is represented.  Some people (many people)
>>want to be able to say
>>    this is
>>    a monospaced    example
>>    and the columns line up.
>>
>>and have spaces, tabs and newlines be significant in the markup in order
>>to represent that in a ``WYSIWYG'' way.  Then people with no background
>>in design can try and lay out their source code or DTDs and align unrelated
>>things at the expense of clarity :-), and neither the receiving application
>>nor the screen or paper layout designer can correct the errors without
>>extensive hand work, it's awful.
>
>At first, I was going to say that this was a poor example and suggest
>that you considered most of the programming reference books on your
>shelves, but then I realized that it isn't so bad. The only difference
>is that I think you're assuming that someone typed your example. We have
>hundreds (thousands?) of tabular ASCII report options in various
>software products. The documentation for that software naturally contains
>samples of those reports. I just can't picture myself promoting a
>language that requires people to go in and add markup to these examples.
>I don't think I could even convince myself to use such a language.

Could you picture a trivial variant of SGMLNORM (XMLNORM?) that brackets all the
data and solves the RE/RS/whitespace problem properly? 
--
Charles F. Goldfarb * Information Management Consulting * +1(408)867-5553
           13075 Paramount Drive * Saratoga CA 95070 * USA
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Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 09:08:31 UTC