Re: B.9 Formal system, public identifiers?

At 06:24 PM 10/15/96 +0000, James Clark wrote:

>I just counted the number of lines of code in the part of SP that handles
>external entities; I included just the URL and OSFILE storage mangers, and
>just the UTF-8 and Unicode encodings.  It was more than 5000 lines. 

So this was just fSi, not fPi?  Interesting; and a powerful argument.
Would you have any insights as to what the "tough bits" are that make
this so hard?  It seems on the face of it that FSI handlers for URLs and
OSFiles ought to be pretty easy; would it be possible to contemplate
cutting a lot of the options out, so that all you had left was something
along the lines of 

<!element fsi ( url | osfile ) >
<!attlist fsi base CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!element url CDATA>
<!element osfile CDATA>  [yeah, I know we don't have CDATA in XML]

This at least has the virtue that (a) it slips into the base of what
SGML offers, and (b) allows room for clean extensibility.

Until I read James' posting, I was ready to lose FPI's (& PUBLIC for
that matter) and keep FSI's.  I'd still like to keep at least a subset
of the nice clean FSI syntax.  James?



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

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 1996 14:15:28 UTC