Re: A note on case sensitivity

> I don't understand the A-J analogy.  How can case insensitivity be like 
> having a restricted alphabet, if the difference is only "case" (whatever 
> that notion means) and not something more significant that makes the
> thing turn into another character entirely?

Because the SGML model for case sensitivity does not work in some
languages if the full alphabet is used.
If lower case v and w both turned into capital W in English,
in a case insensitive system, v and w would not be distinguished,
and vine and wine would map to the same string.
Hence <P ID="wine"> and <P ID="vine"> would be illegal.

Now, although v and w do not both map into W in English,
e and e acute both map into E in French, but do not do so in
Canadian French.  Hence, it would either have to be an error to use an
e acute in an ID in XML, or you'd have to face the situation that
two words as different as wine and vine might end up being collated
together and considered the same string after conversion to upper case.

> Particularly considering that HyTime makes a distinction (if a weak and
> conventional one) between !element and !ELEMENT

Well, it shouldn't.

> Element GIs are names, too, and if you have
> NAMECASE GENERAL NO and a declaration like the following (as
> DocBook does):
> 
> <!ELEMENT FormalPara ...>
> 
> ...your instance had better look like this:
> 
> <FormalPara>
> ...
> </FormalPara>

Yes.  Thankfully.  Let's get rid of this annoying case folding thing!

Lee

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 1996 15:11:35 UTC