Re: questions on XML sgml decl's charsets

At 12:55 PM 1/13/97, Joe English wrote:

>Let me ask the converse question: is there a rationale
>*for* specifiying shunned characters?

I've never figured one out.  In fact, as best I can tell, once you
realize that (1) characters aren't bytes, (2) the concrete syntax
specification is supposed to be dealing with the interpretation of
characters as markup, not the representation of characters in the
system (which at best is under the purview of the document character
set), and (3) the document character set isn't the same as the
syntax-reference character set, the prescribed interpretation of
shunned characters is at best nebulous.

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 1997 18:07:49 UTC