Re: RS/RE: basic questions

At 12:21 PM 9/23/96 -0400, David G. Durand"  (David G. Durand wrote:
>   There are still a some hard questions about how, and whether to try to
>normalize the marking of input lines (ie. should we preserve the input
>character stream intact, convert to an XML-standard linend convention
>before we send data to the application, require a standard linend
>convention on XML input, or simply ignore line endings entirely and require
>markup for significant linends). But I think the current rules for RS/RE
>just don't make the grade. We should not let our decisions about other SGML
>features (like includions, comments, and markjed sections) depend on the
>handling of this one issue -- we should resolve markup features on their
>value as markup, not their ability to preserve line endign comaptibility
>with 8879.

If we don't have SHORTREF, I don't see that the parser should care what
kind of whitespace it read and could just pass everything along to the
application. Even the whitespace in element content wouldn't cause the
application any problems. It's just going to ignore any extra whitespace
anyway unless the stylesheet tells it that it is significant.

Even Joe's example of

	<a>
	<b>blah</b>
	<b>blah</b>
	</a>

isn't significant. The stylesheet will determine whether or not <b> starts
a new line.

I may have forgotten a case or two, but the only place I can think of where
the parser *may* need to normalize the whitespace is in CDATA attributes,
otherwise it has no idea if the whitespace is significant to the display
or not and it shouldn't need to care.

I have a slightly different idea of what the "true" data is in a document
as compared to Charles. I think the "true" data is anything outside the
pointy brackets. 7.6.1 essentially tells typists that they don't
have to worry about the trailing newline after some types of markup. I
think it's easier to tell them that everything after the MDC is data 


bob


Robert Streich				streich@slb.com
Schlumberger				voice: 1 512 331 3318
Austin Research				fax:   1 512 331 3760

Received on Monday, 23 September 1996 22:12:03 UTC