Re: RS/RE: basic questions

At 9:11 PM 9/23/96, Robert Streich wrote:
>At 12:21 PM 9/23/96 -0400, David G. Durand"  (David G. Durand wrote:
>>   There are still a some hard questions about how, and whether to try to
>>normalize the marking of input lines (ie. should we preserve the input
>>character stream intact, convert to an XML-standard linend convention
>>before we send data to the application, require a standard linend
>>convention on XML input, or simply ignore line endings entirely and require
>>markup for significant linends).
>
>If we don't have SHORTREF, I don't see that the parser should care what
>kind of whitespace it read and could just pass everything along to the
>application. Even the whitespace in element content wouldn't cause the
>application any problems. It's just going to ignore any extra whitespace
>anyway unless the stylesheet tells it that it is significant.
>

   I like this, and agree. The hard issue that I'm worried about is the
fact that transport mechanisms sometimes mess with line encodings and thus
change the byte-sequence. This is an entity-management question, but given
the realities of email, for instance, I get nervous about assuming that \n
will not mutate into \r\n. This has been the only reason I can see for
RS/RE as defined. I never thought that ignoring initial withespace in
markup was anything but confusing... It wasn't until I had to spend a
couple of hours with the handbook that I even claimed to understand the
rules... That seems too high a price to pay for "convenient formatting",
especially when there is the angle whitespace in brackets solution:
"<p
>this is a paragraph with no initial or final whitespace</p>"


   -- 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 10:39:33 UTC