- From: David Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 21:01:51 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 8:20 PM +0000 2/20/97, Digitome Ltd. wrote: >I aggree. But I *do* wish we could stop referring to SGML files as "legacy". >Surely SGML->XML is a "down-translation" not an "up-translation". Afraid not. You lose no information in going from SGML to XML, unless you have somehow managed to come up with a way to use SHORTREF that could not be equivalently expressed with tags. It is a cross-translation, since any SGML DTD and any XML DTD should be able to operate at the same level of abstraction. Actaully, there are a few exceptions: as far as I can tell, the only place where we lose information with the current draft is in some rare content model with mixed content, in SDATA, where a meaningful string must be hand-translated to a numeric code, and separately documented, and (hopefully not for long), with PUBLIC, where a location independent perpetually valid identifier must be replaced with a method that depends on a particular technical infrastructure for resolution. As this is a follow on to the previous thread and SDATA was raised by someone else, I will repeat my plea that we allow a way to use strings for undefined characters instead of undefined code points. In the absence of a resolution mechanism, they are equivalent, but SDATA has key advantages: compatible with established SGML practice (CoST and SP for instance), and potentially provide supereior information to a user. SDATA also extends easily and obviously to implementation of a registration mechanism in the future -- Private use characters do not. I am not a number, I am an undefined character! -- David _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Thursday, 20 February 1997 21:04:42 UTC