Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

Paul wrote:
> As I mentioned before, it would be better off leaving out whitespace between
> elements. We can't have *both* all whitespace significant *and* reliable
> whitespace removal for pretty printing.

I have a really simple idea: if you want to keep absolute 
SGML compatability *and* allow DTD-less parsing. Why not write
a filter that will rewrite your instances such that they produce
exactly the same parse tree in XML and SGML parsers? It'd probably
take less time to do than the time spent arguing....

>Long Note: I have used the term "XML reader" to mean the code that reads the
>sequence of input characters and turns it into a stream of tokens or
>potential tree nodes for a program that will build a tree or do whatever
>else it wants with the information; in computer science this is called a
>parser

Right, and this corresponds to my use of the term "parser", though it
might also be close to traditional "scanners" too. SGML is
interesting because it has a parser for it's input stream, and another
parser for the grammar defined by the DTD...

Received on Friday, 13 December 1996 09:19:32 UTC