Re: Newlines in element content (i.e TABLES)

At 08:43 PM 9/25/96 -0400, Paul Prescod wrote:
>At 06:14 PM 9/25/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:
>>That's correct.  For what it's worth, SoftQuad Panorama can display SGML
>>tables with newlines between the tags, even if PCDATA is allowed there.
>>It isn't particularly hard to implement, as far as I can see.
>
>But should every SGML application have to implement it over and over again?
>That means that between and within ANY ELEMENT you would have to explicitly
>look out for "meaningless" newlines. Instead of implementing the handling in
>the parser (which code we expect to be used over and over again) you must
>implement it in the application.

I would bet that many applications already do. The point is that it has to
be done somewhere. The application is the only one that really knows if
the whitespace is significant since it is the one that read the stylesheet.
Personally, if I didn't write the parser, I'd rescan it's output for
meaningless-as-defined-in-the-stylesheet whitespace anyway.

>Then you have to define in your DTD-documentation that newlines in that
>context are going to be interpreted as "meaningless" which means that we are
>shifting the documentation and education burden to application designers.

Not in your DTD. It's part of the stylesheet.

bob


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

Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 02:03:14 UTC