- From: Steven J. DeRose <sjd@ebt.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 14:30:02 -0500
- To: <dgd@cs.bu.edu> (David G. Durand), w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
David G. Durand wrote: > HTML compatibility is a very good argument. (close to knock-down, >drag-out, to me). What I don't like is that the <e> format requires a DTD >for XML processing (or partial DTD, which seems confusing to me), and <e/> >does not. I think the foreign syntax is easy to justify given the >elimination of the need for any DTD information. Easier than the >explanation that you have to declare "just one little thing" if you don't >have a DTD, but do use empty elements. The two aren't necessarily incompatible... If we allow <e/> we can also allow <e> for empties if and only if they are declared. This is fine in SGML too, since EMPTY elements can use NET-enabling start-tags just fine. This way we get some level of backward compatibility to everybody. The downside is that there are then two ways of saying the same thing; but it does let us support legacy HTML data (given that the HTML DTD does the right declarations), and let's us introduce the syntactic distinction for the benefit of our posterity. s
Received on Monday, 28 October 1996 14:33:39 UTC