Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

>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?

Such hyperlinking could be useful in solving a difficult problem:
alignment in multilingual texts.

That said, I still feel that 
   1) We are the "Masters of the XML Grove Plans (tm)",
   2) There are no DSSSL or HyTime systems based on XML that
      have a lagre user base yet,
   3) No matter what we do, many *existing* SGML systems will not be
      able to parse XML instances without (relatively minor) changes
      to said systems, 
   and that 4) we really do desire parse results to be the same,
   independent of whether we have a DTD or not,

that having all whitespace be significant still seems a reasonable way to
go. I can live with -XML-???? attributes as a standardised application
hinting mechanism, but feel it's not really necessary, and that
authors should never *assume* that it will always have the desired
effect.

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 1996 21:08:20 UTC