Re: Newlines in element content (i.e TABLES)

At 06:14 PM 9/25/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:
>That's correct.  For what it's worth, SoftQuad Panorama can display SGML
>tables with newlines between the tags, even if PCDATA is allowed there.
>It isn't particularly hard to implement, as far as I can see.

But should every SGML application have to implement it over and over again?
That means that between and within ANY ELEMENT you would have to explicitly
look out for "meaningless" newlines. Instead of implementing the handling in
the parser (which code we expect to be used over and over again) you must
implement it in the application.

Then you have to define in your DTD-documentation that newlines in that
context are going to be interpreted as "meaningless" which means that we are
shifting the documentation and education burden to application designers.

>Try making P a Panorama table and B a table cell in an HTML file... :-)
>
>Note that a parser without a DTD also can't use SHORTREF to interpret quotes.

A DTD-less parser doesn't know or care that it is dealing with shortref. It
would treat '"' as "PCDATA Start" and "PCDATA End".

 Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 1996 20:48:23 UTC