Re: Shortrefs fatally flawed

At 11:09 AM 10/2/96 -0400, David G. Durand"  (David G. Durand wrote:
>   I just realized that we are seriously hosed if we endorse the use of
>shortrefs and some pseudo-element to implement an SGML-compatible a quoting
>syntax for XML. Say, we define a pseudo element <pe>, for the sake of
>argument. Now we need to document a restriction that no element may be
>called <pe>, or else we will generate a terribly wrong ESIS. We are also
>likely to make the process of creating content models extremely difficult,
>due to the name conflict, and content model cooking required in the
>conversion to an SGML DTD.

I think we can pick a name that is highly likely not to be used.  We could
also use some sort of psuedo SGML declaration to rename both the
psuedo-element element type and the delimiter pair used to quote data, e.g.:

<?XML PSEUDO="XXZZY" PEO="[" PEC="]">
<Mydoc>
 <foo>[This is quoted data]</foo>
</Mydoc>

Note also that "\" *can* be used with the RCS as a shortref delimiter, you
just have to use a numeric character reference in the SGML Declaration, e.g.:

         DELIM    GENERAL  SGMLREF
                  SHORTREF SGMLREF  "&#092;<" 
                                    "&#092;&" 
                                    "&#092;[" 
                                    "&#092;]" 
                                    "&#092;&#34;" 
                                    "&#092;&#39;" 
                                    "&#092;&#092;"

These shortrefs provide "escapes" for the common delimters, e.g. \<, \&,
\[, \], \\, etc.

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (kimber@passage.com) 
Senior SGML Consultant and HyTime Specialist
Passage Systems, Inc., (512)339-1400
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Received on Wednesday, 2 October 1996 11:55:57 UTC