Re: (Resend) Re: A7: CDATA, RCDATA, TEMP marked sections?

At 11:30 AM 10/7/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>This works.  I do hate to edit files like this using Ascii editors;
>marked sections make it much easier to read the examples.  But any
>argument in favor of retaining (R)CDATA marked sections seesm to rely
>exclusively on aesthetics and convenience.

Let me add to that list: document validity and maintenance. Not long ago, I
ran into a set of documents on SGML Open's site that were invisible in my
browser because the content had not been properly escaped. I can't remember
the exact series of documents, but they were written by a prominant member
of the community and encoded, probably by the SGML Open web maintenance team.

If these knowledgable people can make this mistake, (by accident, certainly
not through ignorance) then what of Joe Webmeister and Jane PerlHacker? I
think that this is the kind of feature that browser vendors and other
tool-makers would be glad to implement in order to make their lives easier.
And as I mentioned before, if we don't include it, we risk having them come
up with their own solutions, a la:

<JAVASCRIPT>
<!-- 
/* 
This is javascript, and I'm counting on the "- - >" characters not occuring
in my data. XML/SGML tools can't work with this element meaningfully. Oh well.
*/ -->
</JAVASCRIPT>

 Paul Prescod

Received on Monday, 7 October 1996 13:04:12 UTC