Re: RS/RE: basic questions

At 11:17 PM 9/23/96 GMT, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:
>Making it an "application convention" to strip what appears to be extraneous
>whitespace (i.e., to figure out what is the "true information", just shifts the
>burden from a few parsers to all applications and increases the chance of
>inconsistent treatment).

Applications already have this burden though, Charles. I'd expect any
browser to collapse multiple whitespace characters into a single space
unless I directed that I want "verbatim" formatting. Even with the quoted-
content model, I'd expect this behavior.

> Alternatively, telling the user that he can't put
>markup or an included element on a line by itself just shifts the burden to
him,
>with even more chance of error if he doesn't have a validating editor.

I'm sure you'd see a lot more errors with quoting. Even when programming,
forgetting to put a closing quote on a string is probably the most common
error that I make.

Unless you treat the content of the quoted text as RCDATA, I think you'd
also get a lot of strange looks from new-to-XML typists when you tell them
that you can't put elements inside quoted text.

bob

Robert Streich				streich@slb.com
Schlumberger				voice: 1 512 331 3318
Austin Research				fax:   1 512 331 3760

Received on Monday, 23 September 1996 21:29:59 UTC