- From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
- Date: Mon, 21 Oct 96 09:07:58 CDT
- To: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
If I am reading the postings from David Durand, Lee Quin, and John Lavagnino correctly, it seems that my earlier note embodied a large misconception. I had asked for references to 8879 to explain the behavior they seem to be associating with SDATA entities; they seem, if I understand correctly, to be unanimous in saying that 8879 does not in fact define the desired behavior at all, but that it's widely implemented and well understood (and, I assume, should be incorporated into XML 1.0). So what seems to be at issue is *not* whether XML 1.0 should retain the SGML 'SDATA' keyword, but whether it should retain that keyword and prescribe some particular behavior for processors encountering it. Here's a confession that if this behavior is widely implemented, I haven't seen it in the software I use most frequently. Perhaps I just don't read the manuals carefully enough, but the only program that comes to mind as describing any behavior like this is Panorama, and its functionality (rendering correctly all the characters in the ISO entity sets for which the local system has font resources) can be done with character references to ISO 10646, since all the characters in the ISO entity sets are in 10646 (some glyphs representing ligatures are missing). As to the other proposition, that it is widely understood, I can only say that if it is widely understood, then surely someone can be found to describe the behavior on this list explicitly enough that the rest of us can also understand it. I for one do not understand the behavior, and would really like a description, preferably with reference to some documentation. -C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Received on Monday, 21 October 1996 10:43:10 UTC