Re: Name groups in ELEMENT and ATTLIST Decls

At 1:07 PM 3/25/97, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:51:40 -0500 Martin Pike said:
>
>>I have ploughed through the mail archive of this group looking for
>>any arguments for or against the removal of name groups in the
>>element type part of an ELEMENT and ATTLIST declaration.  i.e.
>><!ELEMENT (a|b|c|d)  ...........

>The main argument against is simple to describe:  anything you can
>say with name groups of this sort, you can say without them.  And
>eliminating the construct eliminates the need to describe and explain
>it in the spec, and the need for readers to understand it.
>
>In any language, every new construct imposes some burden of
>documentation and complication.  In a language designed to be as
>lightweight as possible, complications of any kind are very hard to
>justify.

Just like in all those programming languages where you say

        integer a ;
        integer b ;
        integer c ;
        integer d ;

--which is much easier than

        integer a, b, c, d ;

;-)

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Tuesday, 25 March 1997 19:24:04 UTC