Re: Current Status of Discussion on RE/RS Handling

At 11:41 AM 9/26/96, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
.... stuff about genesis of proposal in a phone call deleted ...
>
>An XML parser shall interpret white space and record ends in XML documents
>as follows:
>
>1. All white space, including RS and RE, immediately following start tags and
>   immediately preceding end tags is not significant.
>
>2. All other RS/REs are collapsed to a single space.

   I like the consistency and simplicity of these rules, but the lack of
any way to have a "verbatim" element is a fatal flaw. Pandering to typists
is not a good idea, but removing useful functionality for the sole sake of
preserving compatibility is far worse. I still have not seen any reason
that we ever _need_ to ignore a linend character in an element. Given that,
I oppose ignoring them all, just so that we can preserve SGML's bad habit
of ignoring some.

   C showed us the way almost 2 decades ago: '\n' '\r' are whitespace, and
characters _like any others_.

RE delenda est.

   -- David

--------------------------------------------+--------------------------
David Durand                  dgd@cs.bu.edu | david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science          | Dynamic Diagrams
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/    | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/

Received on Friday, 27 September 1996 10:39:38 UTC