RS/RE

At 01:43 PM 9/12/96 GMT, Gavin Nicol wrote:

>>One thing that's hard is the rules about how REs adjacent to PIs are
>>handled.
>David Durand and I independently came up with a good way of dealing
>with such things 

I've heard about this but never seen it.  Could you or David or
someone please post it to the group?  In our informal discussions
before the advent of the WG, figuring out what to do about RS/RE, without
busting our 8879 compliance, was one of the most worrying things.

My "MGML" parsing system does the following:

 At any point in the document, the parser knows from the content model
 whether data can appear.  If so, all bytes that are not markup are data.
 If not, all white space is ignored, and non-whitespace non-markup is an
 error.

This sacrifices some flexibility, but has the immense advantage that you
can explain it completely in 40 words to both users and programmers.  Which
is not the case for the SGML rules.  Unfortunately, I don't think this can 
ever be made 8879-compliant.

Our goal for XML is something that is crisp and clear as the above, but is also 
8879-legal.  If someone on the group could give us a flash of creativity on 
this, that would be wonderful.

Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 11:16:18 UTC