[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Compliance with 8879, a moving target

At 06:48 PM 9/10/96 +0100, Martin Bryan wrote:

>WG8 have agreed in principle that there can be more than one attlist
>declaration for an element in future versions of SGML. It is possible that
>there will be new rules about the interpretation of attlists in which the
>same attribute name occurs in two declarations for a particular element.

Which raises an interesting question, when XML is going in a direction that
it seems like WG8 is as well, should we (a) leap out ahead, or (b) wait for
them to do it.  For example, I noticed Charles Goldfarb on comp.text.sgml
raising the idea of a syntactically distinguishable start tag for an EMPTY
element.  This would solve a big problem for XML (which we haven't kicked
around here yet).

Personally, I lean to (b) - we should figure out our own way to solve the 
problems while remaining maximally compliant with 8879 - while cheering them
on, of course.

Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167
Follow-Ups: