- From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU>
- Date: Wed, 11 Sep 96 16:23:30 CDT
- To: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
Like Paul, I guess I think PIs aren't all that hard to deal with, though it might be nice to specify a canonical method of escaping PIC within them. The one thing I have most missed in PIs as currently constituted is a reasonably simple, mostly reliable method for different applications to avoid tripping over each other's PIs. I have the impression that some applications try to make all of their PIs begin with some keyword (say, the name of the application), so that they can readily tell, by looking just at the first token of the PI, whether the PI could possibly be theirs or not. So a document with <?TeX \vskip 0.75in> <?WScript .sp 4.5 a> <?teihtml filebreak> could be processed by applications which recognize the keywords TeX, WScript, and teihtml, and each application can know from the keywords which PIs it should pay attention to, and which it can (and should!) ignore. Such a self-assigned keyword system is not, of course, 100% reliable, but it's somewhat more reliable than having no such pattern at all. Is this a convention for using PIs that XML ought to require or recommend? -C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Received on Wednesday, 11 September 1996 17:32:43 UTC