Re: Parameter entities allowed anywhere ?

Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> To be honest though I don't think this is a correct reading of
> production 33.  There should probably be prose saying that
> PE references in the internal and external subsets are invisible
> to the grammar (in the sense that the replacement text has to
> fit where the reference goes, i.e. that you stay in the internal
> subset rule), except that references can only occur where the
> grammar say they can. (Except that that is also false; the
> grammar makes no pretense of saying where PE refs can occur
> within declarations.  Perhaps it's the limitations of my technical
> training, but I have not found a clean way to describe the PE
> rules formally, and not much of a clean way to describe them
> informally, either.  Any help from the assembled wise ones would
> be very useful.

You were talking about prose in the standard. I am not
too much of a person that is crazy about formal languages.
However, IMHO the less prose in the XML standard the better.
(But I think everybody will agree on this.....or not?)

I do believe the less prose, the more implementors
we will get. I have started to implement an SGML parser 
when I knew about SGML that it is something like Standard or
was it Structured GML.... :-) Putting down the productions
of the SGML handbook was pretty much straightforward,
but then ....

During the implementation of XML I tried to implement it the
way it is prescribed in the standard literally (like a person without
any SGML knowledge would do....) After all, one day we have to 
face the WWW crowd and guess how eager the will be to read
through lots of potentially ambigous prose.

When I tested XML first time against the XML test-instances I had 
to change the grammar lot.
(Especiall many S were missing the current draft. Maybe,
one day, I will have the time to put down all the *mistakes* 
I enountered)

Finally, if you think that my interpretation of production 33
in the current draft is wrong ,or at least not correct :-), then I 
just would like to know how one can deduce that (%par;) works in
XML.

PS: Just playing devils advocate......

-- 
Best regards,
Norbert H. Mikula

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= SGML, DSSSL, Intra- & Internet, AI, Java 
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Received on Thursday, 27 February 1997 06:13:40 UTC