Re: XML and required DTDs

At 10:45 PM 9/17/96 GMT, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:

>Unfortunately, the existing proposals for handling whitespace don't  work (see
>earlier postings from myself and James Clark). There are only two solutions that
>do:

>1. RE/RS handling a la SGML (or, preferably, a la the proposals for SGML97,
>which simplify things considerably); or

Could you post a reference for (or even better, summary of) the SGML97 
proposals?; I would love nothing better than to dodge the RS/RE issue in XML 
in favor of a WG8-invented solution.  

Clearly, there is a near-consensus here that the SGML RS/RE rules are "too 
complicated" (the quotes signal my lack of interest in arguing about the 
correctness of this perception) for use in XML.

I at least am very very VERY reluctant to give up mixed content and PI's
to work around the RS/RE problem.  In fact, this is the one area where, in
order to produce something truly usable, some of us, I think, might be willing
to live with being non-ISO-8879-compliant (ideally only for a while).  

If it's clear which way WG8 is going to go on this, it would be very helpful
to know that.

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

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 1996 12:32:41 UTC