- From: Robert Streich <streich@slb.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Sep 96 01:03:55 CDT
- To: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
- Cc: "Christopher R. Maden" <crm@ebt.com>, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 08:14 PM 9/27/96 +0000, James Clark wrote: >If the rules about ignoring white-space are left to the XML application and >the application is free to require that those rules are not applied for >verbatim elements, then XML tools built on top of SGML parsers will be >unable to correctly process some XML documents, namely those that have >verbatim elements that include REs that are ignored according to the SGML >rules. (An application could get information from the SGML parser about the >record-ends it ignored and attempt to undo the ignoring that was done by >the SGML parser, but that's not going to be practical in many cases.) The >effect would be to prevent most unmodified SGML-based tools from being able >reliably to process XML documents. > >I would say that would be a far worse situation for XML to be in than >requiring that a user, in verbatim text, simply replace space and newline by >entity references at the same time as they are replacing <, > and & by >entity references. I disagree with this, James. I think the likelihood of someone inserting markup into a "verbatim" element that would trigger the ignore-this-RE rule in SGML is very, very small. With SGML, the intrusion on elements of this type in our data has been minimal. Even in PCDATA, the need to replace '<' and '&' is rare and we never have to replace '>'. But why the mention of spaces? I thought these were left unscathed. bob Robert Streich streich@slb.com Schlumberger voice: 1 512 331 3318 Austin Research fax: 1 512 331 3760
Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 02:04:52 UTC