Re: Mixed vs. element content (Was Re: RS/RE, again (sorry))

At 05:48 PM 12/16/96 -0800, Derek Denny-Brown wrote:
>I see this issue raising a distinction not unlike the issue addressed by the
>'Required Markep Declaration' already provided for in the spec.
><http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-xml-961114.html#NT-RMDecl>
>
>Where the RMD says what is required to parse this document properly (or at
>all), we are now talking about what is required to properly parse
>white-space.  I don't really like the -xml-space attribute, it does a
>reasonable job os the simple cases.  (It still is a bit rough though, as
>this whole discussion has pointed out.)   When a document (or it's DTD) is
>too complex for this simple tool to handle it, the document should just be
>able to demand that the DTD be processed in order for white space to be
>parsed properly.  A DSSSL display engine would tell it's XML parser that it
>cares about white space, and the XML parser might thus be required to
>retrieve the DTD when it might not otherwise have needed it.  Similarly, a
>server which servers complex XML documents, might normalize the documents
>such that white space processing was not neccessary (assuming it has access
>to the DTD).

But a "complex" document in this case is any document with whitespace in
element content. Which is to say, probably most:

<LIST>
<ITEM><P>FOO</P></ITEM>
<ITEM><P>BAR</P></ITEM>
</LIST>

So if we go with a scheme of "required DTD downloading to handle 'complex'
whitespace", either XML will get a "rep" as a hard to use language where you
must type this:

<LIST><ITEM><P>FOO</P></ITEM><ITEM><P>BAR</P></ITEM></LIST>

or as a language where you must basically always download the DTD.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 1996 08:16:05 UTC