Re: revised restatement of the RE rules

At 12:19 PM 9/25/96 -0400, Derek Denny-Brown wrote:
>What is so bad about 
>
><p>This is a <?CUE frame23>paragraph</P>
>
>being different from
>
><p>This is a <?CUE frame23>
>paragraph</P>

Nothing, really, but I'm a little concerned about this:

<TABLE><TR><TD>1</TD><TD>2</TD><TD>3</TD><TD>4</TD></TR><TR><TD>1</TD><TD>2<
/TD><TD>3</TD><TD>4</TD></TR></TABLE>

Which is quite unreadable. If you put newlines in, then according to the
"document is a single record" proposal an XML parser would interpret them as
significant (since it can't know element content from mixed content without
a DTD). What is a table-displaying application to do with all of the "data"
between table cells and rows? It will reject them as invalid, one expects,
and spit up the document (though it validates okay). Or should the
application enforce an internal rule that "data is allowed between table
cells and rows, but only if the data consists entirely of newlines." Ugh.
That's what Charles meant about requiring every application to deal with the
problem.

>As I see it, there are 3 proposals on the floor:
> 1) explicit REs, this included Charles' quoting
> 2) _never_ ignore RE's
> 3) no REs (subtly different from (2) where REs are treated as data content)
>
>I worry about (3), but see little real difference between 1 & 2 except
>the actual markup.

Sorry, I'm not subtle enough to understand the difference between 2 and 3.
How can we define all REs as "significant" without treating them as "data
content" or reintroducing SGML's RE complexity.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 1996 17:07:01 UTC