Re: RS/RE: basic questions

Joe English writes:
 > 
 > "W. Eliot Kimber" <kimber@passage.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > [...] but I think it's clear, as James pointed out
 > > what seems like years ago that the only real solution to the RE problem
 > > that preserves SGML compatibility is to eliminate mixed content, which
 > > means quoting data.
 > 
 > 
 > This is not the *only* solution.  Another is to
 > forbid whitespace in element content.  Another
 > is to require that pseudoelements which contain
 > nothing but whitespace be "escaped" with entity
 > references.  Still another (which nobody's mentioned
 > yet for some reason :-) is to forbid *element* content,
 > so that all whitespace becomes significant.

Actually, it has been mentioned, by Paul Prescod, I think.
Doesn't your rule forbidding white space in element content
amount to the same thing to a DTD-less XML parser? It won't
know where data isn't allowed.

I toyed with the idea myself for a while -- figuring we'd
just leave it to the application (through style sheets or
whatever) to ignore those SSEPs it wasn't interested in.
When I realized I had just invented a new kind of comment,
I got badly frightened by the implications.

<tr><td>cell 1</td><td>cell 2</td> Go ahead, tell me some
                                   clever hacker won't start
			           informing the readers of 
                                   comp.infosystems.authoring.htXml
				   that this is where you put your
				   special, secret codes.
			           </tr>


-Bill

-- 
William D. Lindsey
blindsey@bdmtech.com
+1 (303) 672-8954

Received on Thursday, 3 October 1996 00:44:11 UTC