Re: Comments on 31 March spec

At 08:38 3/4/97 CST, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>>It should be made clear in 2.7 that there is no way in which you can
>>enter ]]> in a CDATA section as ]]> will only be recognized outside
>>of such sections.
>
>Isn't this clear enough already?  It does follow directly from the
>explicit statement that only ']]>' is recognized.  We cannot hope to
>list explicitly every consequence of every rule; there needs to be some
>reliance on having a reader capable of seeing that if only CDEnd is
>recognized, then Reference is not recognized (particularly since this
>inference is confirmed by the parenthetical remark about lt and amp).

It is clear enough to an SGML expert/XML developer - but any author trying
to illustrate a marked section within a CDATA marked section is going to
generate an error message. I was hoping to have some explicit wording to
this effect within the section on marked sections, rather than having to
look elsewhere for the cause of the error message.

>>In 2.8 the second paragraph ends with a hanging sentence, viz:
>
>Not in my copy.  Are you sure you're not falling victim to the
>Netscape bug that displays some lines as white space if you scroll
>by small increments?

Absolutely sure: The source code ends with the word "that" followed by </p>

>>For 3.4, under what circumstances is SkipLit valid if ignored marked
>>sections can only contain complete markup declarations?
>
>Where does it say that ignored marked sections can contain only complete
>markup declarations?  

In the preceding paragraph, where you explicityly state "a conditional
section may contain one or more complete declarations, comments, or nested
conditional sections, intermingled with white space. Conditional sections
must not occur within declarations, except the document-type declaration". 
This precludes any chance of it starting within any declaration that
contains a literal that needs to be skipped.

----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.sgml.u-net.com/

Received on Thursday, 3 April 1997 11:42:31 UTC