Re: questions on XML sgml decl's charsets

paul@arbortext.com (Paul Grosso) wrote:

> In the syntax, I see we shun no characters whereas most sgml decls
> shun some set of control characters at least.  What's the rationale
> here for no shun characters?

I strongly suspect that most SGML declarations include
"SHUNCHAR CONTROLS etc." only because few people ever
write an SGML declaration from scratch; most just copy
an existing one and modify it, leaving the parts they don't
understand untouched.  Since few people understand SHUNCHAR
(I am not among them, BTW), that clause has survived largely
unmutated from the ancestral declaration in ISO 8879.

Let me ask the converse question: is there a rationale
*for* specifiying shunned characters?


--Joe English

  jenglish@crl.com

Received on Monday, 13 January 1997 15:56:17 UTC