- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 12:51:30 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
The issues of syntactic simplicity and compatibility with the style of almost all modern programming languages argue strongly for a single comment start and comment end string. <!-- and --> are already used that way by most people, so should remain. I think that a comment should be valid anywhere an s is, except in DTD delarations (where compatiblity dictates that we not have any comments of this form). I don't have a problem adding "-- comment --" inside declarations, but only if comment and space are equivalent. We should not preserve the current confusion between syntactic and lexical analysis in XML whenever possible. Since it would be user and not just implementor visible in declaration syntax, I think that such comments are right out unless we decide to be incompatible. We should really make sure that comments can be treated like whitespace by a lexical analyzer. We still have Delimiter in context woes, but if there are only two contexts, with transitions triggered by "<" and ">", it is still tirivial to implement in a lex equivalent or very short hand-coded lexer. I would rather that the syntax were also described in two levels to make this strategy more self-evident, but as longs as it's possible, I think we are OK. -- David I am not a number. I am an undefined character. _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Thursday, 12 December 1996 12:52:04 UTC