- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 19:08:13 -0400
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 2:03 PM 10/20/96, lee@sq.com wrote: >> Both David Durand and Lee Quin seem to be interpreting SDATA >> entities as things which provide a system-independent specification >> of characters or glyphs, in particular full names of the character or >> glyph, in the style familiar from ISO character-set standards. >> >> Since I had understood SDATA to be intended to hold system-*de*pendent > >I am actually not so interpreting SDATA entities, which is why I pointed >to TEI WSDs and Harry Gaylord's article in my message. Nor am I, exactly. I can put system independent data in my system dependent string, if I want. No harm, and much good results. The XML convention should be that SDATA (or whatever other mechanism we choose) information should be _preferably_ machine-processable, and _certainly_ human-meaningful. With an open set we can do little more. I agree that full WSDs would be nice, but I can live without that a lot easier than I can live with magic numbers. >I care not one whit about SDATA, as I have said. >What I do care about is retaining the ability to give a >human-readable description of a character or glyph in such >a way that an application can be expected to present it to the user, >rather like the ALT attribute to an image in HTML. Yes. Exactly. >SDATA entities give you a way of doing that today -- if you like, >you can do > <!Entity x SDATA "the latin letter small x"> >The ISO 10646 user space alone does not do that. Yes, exactly! >James' suggestion of the form ><!Entity Klingon.W '<char alt="Klongon letter W">W</char>'> >is a good one and I could live with it, but would like it explicitly >mentioned somewhere in the Famous Twenty Pages. If we go this route, it must not _require_ declarations in the DTD, though a user might prefer to create entoties to reference common "glyph tags". We need a built-in mechanism to solve this. We can reserve some syntactic form to accomodate ISO-standard WSDs or whatever in the next revision. >James mentioned the use of DSSSL, but I have not been assuming that >every XML implementation would be required to support DSSSL. >If they are, I'm out of here right now. A good point. We are going to have to specify (yechhhh!) how we (*shudder*) will attach cascading style sheets (^blarg^) to our XML documents. We may not ever get anything better in wide use. >> When we return to this topic in preparing future revisions, perhaps >> the TEI WSD can be considered as a mechanism for documenting and >> making out-of-band agreements for the private use area of 10646. >> For now, XML leaves this problem where we found it: private use >> areas, and privately created character sets or glyph sets, require >> private agreement out of band. If SDATA provided a readymade >> method of handling this problem, then I'd be happy to keep it. But >> it doesn't seem to me that it does. > >Again, I'm not arguing for keeping SDATA, but only for having a >mnemonic string. The WSD would be a good way to do it, but I >can live with James' hack if necessary. I gree with you that >SDATA doesn't handle all of te problem either. But it does solve an important part of the problem. >Lee -- 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 19:03:46 UTC