Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

At 08:20 AM 12/17/96 -0800, Jon Bosak wrote:
>I asked:
>
>| >[Chris Maden:]
>| >
>| >| 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.
>| >
>| >Sorry to be so slow here, but what's the connection with sibling
>| >relationships?  My idea of a well-formed XML document is one for which
>| >there is just one possible tree structure; what's different about
>| >sibling relationships if a DTD is provided?
>
>To which a kind correspondent replied:
>
>| A DTD-less parser will interpret element-content whitespace as a #PCDATA
>| node. A DTD-full parser will just strip it out. The number of nodes in your
>| document will change.
>| 
>| <LIST>
>| <UITEM>...</UITEM>
>| <UITEM>...</UITEM>
>| </LIST>
>| 
>| Each newline will be a node in one, and not the other.
>
>Allow me to wallow in ignorance a bit further.  I'm finding it hard to
>visualize a situation in which I would want to address something based
>on pseudo-element relationships rather than "genuine" tree
>relationships.  It's easy to imagine cases where I would want to refer
>to the TITLE descendant of my ancestor CHAPTER, for example, but I
>have never wanted to refer to the third linefeed in an element.  I'm
>not saying that such situations are inconceivable, I'm just saying
>that I've never encountered one.  Is this one of those cases where 90
>percent of the complexity we're worrying about is being caused by a
>feature that in practice is used .001 percent of the time?

the problem is that one tree would look like:

<list> --|
"that which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal: from which it
follows
 that irregularity - that is to say, the unexpected, surprise, and astonishment,
    are an essential part and characteristic of beauty" - Charles Baudelaire

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 1996 15:17:33 UTC