- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 18:43:33 -0400
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 6:00 PM 10/20/96, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote: >On Sun, 20 Oct 1996 15:18:56 -0400 (EDT), John_Lavagnino@Brown.edu wrote: > >>The SDATA keyword, in very common practice, means "This is a name for >>the character, a name that needs conversion for whatever output device >>you've got at hand." The prescribed effect (at least in the ESIS >>world) is to mark that name as distinct from ordinary document >>content. You can certainly live without that distinction if you don't >>mind unreliable hacks like saying "anything in square brackets is >>really a character name". > >I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, John, but I would like to point out >that "[name]" doesn't have to be a hack. We could have an XML notation, >declared >formally for all element types with data content, in which "[name]" was >*always* >a character name. As long as the ESIS content is unchanged for all systems, >there is no need for text to be declared to the parser as SDATA. Yes, but adding yet another special delimiter with a unique new syntax seems to be making things worse, and not better. Doing that introduces a new limitation (as square brackets now need to be escaped, and a whole new kind of error [undefined character code encountered]. We're better off with a new (pre-reserved) tagname, or even better, sticking with the tried and true SDATA solution. It's new to the HTML folx, but familiar to SGMLers and their parsers. -- David RE delenda est. I am not a number. I am an undefined character. _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________ http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/services_map_main.html
Received on Sunday, 20 October 1996 18:39:06 UTC