Re: RS/RE: basic questions

Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
>> You also need the newline to be significant between <emph>these</emph>
>> <number>two</number> lines.
> 
> Most text editors seem to put spaces
> at the end of lines before they word-wrap.

They do?  None of the ones I use do.

> Touch-typists will put them in without thinking about it.
Not the touch typists I know!  Why on earth would they do that?

Note also that mail software often strips trailing spaces, as users
of older versions of uudecode may sadly attest.

[...]
> Well, the shortref is just a syntactic hack to avoid namespace collision. If
> we don't want to break tools, we could call the element <PRE>.

Well, I'd rather not wire in a name -- hence the prefix.

> >InContext, Microstar's editor (Far and Wide?  I don't mean Near & Far),
> Near and Far author.
Thanks, sorry about that.

[...]

>> At any rate, if most of the most widely deployed SGML tools won't support
>> XML because it needs features that they don't implement, the SGML 
>> compatibility of XML buys little or nothing, I think.
> 
> Agreed.

> According to my understanding, the only way to make all whitespace
> significant (i.e. to pass all whitespace to the application) is to do that
> SGML DECL RE remapping hack. So a LOT of software would have to be changed
> (i.e. almost all of the products you mentioned) if you are right that they
> do not support SGML DECL tricks.

That's what I am trying to find out.  I know that it is not difficult
for Author/Editor, as our parser already does that, on the theory that
an editor oughtn't to go removing whitespace.  The 5 Unicorns theory,
if you will, although since Author/Editor discards minimisation information,
it doesn't actually earn that many Unicorns on the CFG Purity test.

> Are whitespace characters in element context illegal according to this
> scheme? Or are they just passed on to the XML application which must figure
> out to discard them?
If an XML program has a parser and and an application in the SGML
sense, the application handles whitespace in this proposal.

> If they are illegal, then your markup will be very "terse" (i.e. no
> formatting newlines). If they are passed on, then XML applications will
> sometimes be working with different data than SGML applications are.

Of course, an XML-aware SGML program won't have a problem, and an
SGML-aware XML editor could easily give a choice of Save options.

Lee

Received on Thursday, 3 October 1996 00:10:44 UTC