Re: Link-2: Pseudo-elements

At 11:37 AM -0700 5/18/97, Tim Bray wrote:
>What does CHILD(N) mean in mixed content?  Counting pseudo-elements
>is icky to start with, but with our shakiness as to white space in
>element content, it's even shakier.  James has suggested just
>bagging the whole pseudo-element handling thing.  Comments?


RE delenda est.

For those who came into the room late, this means that we should abandon
SGML comaptibility with respect to whitespace, and require that application
interfaces pass all whitespace characters \t \r \n literally in any data
context. This would require changes to SGML to pass data in element content.

However, that decision has been taken and I think most of us pray nightly
that we won't revisit it, so that we won't have to run through the
arguments again...

Perhaps we could declare that pseudo elements are not counted at all: we
would need a special keyword to address PCDATA, and could then treat all
PCDATA in an element as a single string. This is unambigous, but also very
counterintuitive:

<p>something <hp>highlighted</hp> for effect</p>

would have (for addressing purposes) two addressible PCDATA chunks:
"something  for effect" and "highlighted". They would be addressed as "The
PCDATA in <p> and the PCDATA within <hp>, and could be further addressed
into as via token numbers or offsets within the PCDATA.

This addressing model is less obvious than the pseudo-element model, but
(if used with some tokenization scheme) is much less sensistive to being
put off by whitespace anomalies.

   -- David


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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
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Received on Wednesday, 21 May 1997 14:04:43 UTC