- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 14:31:26 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
>At 11:56 AM 20/06/97 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote: >Sigh. My fallback position has always been, can we banish >PE's from the internal subset? The idea is, even if PE's >are agreed to be necessary for validating applications, I can >see no good argument that a lightweight DTD-less WF doc >reader should ever have to deal with them. Unfortunately I see applications for PE in subsets (though if they were no more complicated than general entities it would not be so bad. >As for the difficulty: I (and I think I'm not alone) am >sensitive to issues of parser size. Processing PEs is not >rocket science but will materially add to code bulk. Part >of this code size is code that checks that the PE began and >ended at a legal place [which code SERVES NO USEFUL PURPOSE >FOR MAN OR BEAST] I agree with this, but I don't see how we can abandon the XML is SGML constraint now. And Michael's heartfelt plea for PEs is totally correct. We _need_ them. It would be great if they were a lot simpler (for which, read _NO_ contextual dependencies, or substitution value restrictions). One they are string substitutions (with an anti-infinite substitution rule of some sort), they are not that much bulk, given that they are little different from general entities. WG8, can you save us from ourselves? -- David _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Monday, 23 June 1997 14:40:16 UTC