- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 08:57:56 -0500
- To: papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca
- CC: dgd@cs.bu.edu, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
>>And if you change a >>DTD to turn element content into mixed content (or, God forbid, have a >>parameter entity controlling this), you will have to change a giant mass of >>delimiters in all your instances -- very unfriendly... > >As in "regular" SGML (or two phase XML processing to emulate SGML), changing >an element's content model to mixed content changes all whitespace into >content. Therefore, if you make that change you should go looking at your >instances anyways. They now mean something different than they did before >you changed the DTD. That kind of subtle change is, in my opinion, the most >dangerous to document maintainability. Sounds like a good reason for finding some way of making such changes easier on users to me.... Call me a fool, but I think an overriding goal for software design is to make is as easy for people to do the things they want as possible. This generally means making the processing model as intuitive as possible... so people don't get surprised.
Received on Friday, 13 December 1996 08:59:57 UTC