Re: simplifying comments in SGML '97

I have always used --*......*-- for SGML comments in the hope that one
day it would be possible to make these be comment start & end delimiters,
and I would very much like to see this done for XML.

I think that XML would not be harder to parse if the rule was that a comment
could appear anywhere S could appear; this is very close to the SGML rules,
with the exception that there are some places (e.g. within a content model)
where 8879 forgot (I assume) to allow comments.

This approach encourages (but does not enforce) an implementation in which
comments are stripped at the tokeniser level.

At any rate, I favour the separate delimiters.

Lee

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 1996 15:38:05 UTC