Re: C.14 Enumerations in attribute declarations?

At 1:32 PM 10/17/96, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On 23 October 1996, the ERB will vote to decide the following
>question.  A straw poll indicates the question needs further
>discussion in the work group.  Possible positions are to remove
>8879's restriction (at the cost of more complex XML-to-SGML
>DTD translation), to retain it, to eliminate enumerated values
>entirely in the hope that WG8 will relax the restriction, or
>to retain the restriction but make it a non-reportable error.
>
>C.14 Should XML allow more than one enumerated type (name-group
>declared value) to contain the same possible value (11.3.3)?

We _MUST_ remove this restriction. It's annoying even to SGML users of the
minimization hack it enables. We can never sell it as a reasonable
syntactic restriction. A reportable error should reflect something the user
did that might cause a problem. This attribute value restriction, like the
-- in comment restriction, no longer has any function in XML but to annoy
the user. We don't want to annoy our users, especially when trying to get
them to do something new.

I can't imagine what a non-reportable error even is. If it's an error, it
should be reported, if it shouldn't be reported, then that is prima facie
evidence that it should _not_ be an error.

Enumerated values are too well entrenched in HTML (as well as damned damned
useful) to be eliminated.

 -- David

RE delenda est.   -- A few other things delenda est, as well.

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Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 22:49:10 UTC