Re: Current Status of Discussion on RE/RS Handling

At 01:56 PM 9/27/96 -0400, David G. Durand"  (David G. Durand wrote:
>Yes, that is true, but on a practical note, I cannot see that we are
>heading for wide acceptance if we rule it out. I was not the first on this
>list to raise the issue of vebatim-style elements. This is not going to
>help us make our case to the currently unconvinced. We are taking a common,
>reasonable, well-established usage, and making it impossible, solely for
>compatibility with a feature of SGML that isn't popular, easy to explain,
>or widely understood.

As Lee says, they may not be as reasonable as they seem. Since when did it
become "okay" to encode formatting in an SGML document? And isn't it doubly
wrong to put formatting in using characters that are meant to encode
structure. (i.e. word breaks and line breaks?) Also, most text has to be
escape-encoded for inclusion in an SGML document anyways. Improperly
including non-SGML data in an SGML document is a MAJOR source of errors. It
may be a good thing to make it a little more difficult.

People use verbatim elements because a) SGML "files" usually only have one
entity in them, so people who want to keep their documents in a single file
don't want multiple entities and b) the handling of an entity with notation
"C++" or "Perl" is pretty much up in the air.

Maybe we should fix those two problems to make verbatim formatting
unncessary instead of bringing back verbatim. Mime seems to have solutions
for both.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 27 September 1996 16:37:33 UTC