Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

In attempting to draft an argument to Paul Grosso, I've run into a
quandary.

1) In the absence of a DTD, we must assume mixed content for
   everything.[*]

2) This could create whitespace nodes in element content.

3) A dichotomy between "DTD-ful" and DTD-less parsing will make any
   sibling-based relationship difficult at best; this will affect some
   TEI or HyQ based hyperlinks, as well as sibling-based stylistic
   decisions.

4) The only way to avoid the dichotomy is to preserve these whitespace
   nodes even when a DTD is present.

5) Since SEPCHAR is thrown away in element content, every element must
   be made mixed content, and any element declaration without #PCDATA
   is illegal.

This is clearly unacceptable.  Once the addressing issues are
considered, I don't think that either RE delenda est or Charles
Goldfarb's shortref hack cuts it - Paul Prescod's suggestions of
explicit mixed content delimiters or elimination of mixed content
whitespace seem to be the only workable suggestions.  They're icky,
but I don't see another way.

-Chris

[*] There are proposals for heuristics to determine the difference,
    but I can think of a failure condition for any of the ones I've
    seen so far.
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Received on Monday, 16 December 1996 17:26:45 UTC