- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:32:54 -0400
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 6:36 PM 10/23/96, James Clark wrote: >At 16:50 23/10/96 -0400, Gavin Nicol wrote: > >>As I said earlier, SDATA, or some form of entity typing mechanism, >>seems to me to be crucial to building a good distributed >>character/glyph/font registry/resolution mechnism. I wish to be >>able to do something like: >> >> <!ENTITY foo SDATA "[unicode=XXX glyphid=XXXX charid=XXXX]" > >> >>and to be able to resolve/process that on my local system. > >Why can't you build your mechanism using normal elements > > <!ENTITY foo '<glyph unicode="XXX" glyphid="XXXX" charid="XXXX"/>'> > >? I don't find the argument that "my DTD may not have a glyph element" very >convincing: most SGML DTDs are certainly going to need modifying to >support XML. This will only be useful if we pre-wire a tag into XML. I'm not averse to this, really, as I agree that existing DTDs will be reworked. However, it is a new mechanism, and it adds a funky tag that can't be redefined (if this were not so a processor without a DTD might get a redefined tag of the name "glyph," and choke). People are already used to the syntax &mystery-glyph; The use of that syntax would now be an option that they have to brew up themselves after understanding a new tag. These are not fatal objections, but I still prefer SDATA to this. Also defining the tag, would mean defining the attributes for character meta-data. I don't think we should enter that den of snakes now. Let's reserve the [] syntax in SDATA entities for the future, and finish solving the problem in XML 1.1 or 2.0. -- David _________________________________________ 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 Thursday, 24 October 1996 12:28:13 UTC