Re: SHORTTAG

>>13.5 - SHORTTAG
>>SHORTTAG YES is required to allow attribute values to be entered without
>>literals (and without attribute name and value indicators) but XML should
>>forbid the other options SHORTTAG currently permits. (In the next version of
>>SGML these two roles of SHORTTAG will be clearly distinguished.)
>
>The big problem here is the TEI, which makes heavy use of the minimized
>attribute formulation.  But supporting SHORTTAG flies in the face of our
>design goal of being able to do useful processing of XML docs without having
>the DTD.  The things that are TEI-encoded are already in SGML and
>thus probably aren't crying out for XML - I suspect that following the advent
>of XML, there will be a pretty neat & tidy XML-compliant TEI subset (right,
>Michael and Lou?).
>
>I think all forms of SHORTTAG complicate parsing, don't add enough, and
>should be dropped in XML.

HTML extends SHORTTAG attribute processing to beyond that of SGML (by saying
that unknown attribute names and associated values are ignored) for good
reasons. Attribute entry is one of the areas where users are most prone to
make typing errors (e.g. mistyped attribute names) or try to take short cuts
(such as leaving out the literal quotes or just entering a token value).
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 14:09:27 UTC