RE: Error handling: yes, I did mean it

At 9:02 PM 4/30/97, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>ISO 8879 does require a left-to-right parse.  XML does not explicitly
>require LR parsing directly, and I'm not aware of anything in the
>spec which either (a) requires LR parsing to work right or (b)
>becomes nonsensical if parsing is non-directional.  If I'm right,
>it would be possible (though pointless, I think) to use a
>non-directional or right-to-left parsing algorithm on XML.

Some character string representations can only be read from left
to right to determine the boundaries of the characters within the
bit/byte string.  Isn't shift-JIS one such?  I know of one proprietary
composition system with a large character set that uses such a
representation internally.  So first you'd have to "parse"/"lexically
analyse"/whatever your bit stream into characters left to right and
convert them into a representation that could be read from either
direction.  *Then* you could try XML-parsing from right to left.

:-)

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 1997 22:47:25 UTC