Increasing SGML Decl. QUANTITY?

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Going through some old w-v mail I ran across another instance of custom DTDs
getting treated poorly by v.w.o due to exceeding the QUANTITY values in the
SGML Declaration we use for all non-XML documents. To recap;...

For XML we use:
[[[
         QUANTITY
             NONE -- Quantities are not restricted in XML --
]]] - $CVSROOT/htdocs/sgml-lib/xml.dcl

For anything else we use:
[[[
         QUANTITY SGMLREF
                  ATTCNT   60      -- increased --
                  ATTSPLEN 65536   -- These are the largest values --
                  LITLEN   65536   -- permitted in the declaration --
                  NAMELEN  65536   -- Avoid fixed limits in actual --
                  PILEN    65536   -- implementations of HTML UA's --
                  TAGLVL   100
                  TAGLEN   65536
                  GRPGTCNT 150
                  GRPCNT   64
]]] - $CVSROOT/htdocs/sgml-lib/sgml.dcl

( “GRPCNT” being the one we ran afoul of this time )

Nick and Liam have avoided this issue by increasing some of these values (i.e.
deviating from the published standard), and adopting the same values they are
using has been a topic and shelved on several occasions previously.



In any case… I am now well and truly unable to make up my mind on this.

On the one hand we should always try to make do with whatever the relevant
Rec. says — even though they often make little sense — but OTOH these values
are 1) probably picked more or less at random, 2) do not take into account the
use v.w.o has puts it to, and 3) reduces the usefullness of the Validator for
some advanced users.

In particular I strongly suspect the restricted values were picked by throwing
a dart at the board listing how many attributes etc. a subset of the HTML WG
thought made sense to allow users; and in either case the limitations do not
apply since the HTML DTDs are fixed and do not allow modifications (the HTML
DTDs are already within these limits).


I don't recall what y'all thought on this the last time we discussed it; so
could you give me a summary of your opinion or, failing that, at least a
“vote” on which way to go on this?

Should we try to dig up the original discussions of the HTML WG on this?

Should we use the WDG limits, or should we just set “QUANTITY NONE”?


We could in theory keep the current SGMLDECL for W3C-specified HTML and use a
modified one for custom DTDs (as the WDG does, but is a poor fit with our
current implementation). Is this an option worth exploring?


- -- 
"Fly it until the last piece stops moving..."

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Received on Saturday, 12 February 2005 23:22:41 UTC