Re: RS/RE: basic questions

"W. Eliot Kimber" <kimber@passage.com> wrote:

> [...] but I think it's clear, as James pointed out
> what seems like years ago that the only real solution to the RE problem
> that preserves SGML compatibility is to eliminate mixed content, which
> means quoting data.


This is not the *only* solution.  Another is to
forbid whitespace in element content.  Another
is to require that pseudoelements which contain
nothing but whitespace be "escaped" with entity
references.  Still another (which nobody's mentioned
yet for some reason :-) is to forbid *element* content,
so that all whitespace becomes significant.

The question is which of these options is the least
unpalatable.  Personally, I find a solution that lets
me author in SGML and run instances through a simple
normalizer to be far more palatable than one that
requires me to add black magic to my SGML declaration
and all of my DTDs before I can publish XML.



--Joe English

  jenglish@crl.com

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 1996 17:36:09 UTC