Re: Link-2: Pseudo-elements

At 2:20 PM +0000 5/18/97, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>In message <3.0.32.19970518111401.00b18a30@pop.intergate.bc.ca> Tim Bray
>writes:
>> 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?
>  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Does this refer just to addressing (pseudo)elements or to the whole
>question of whitespace handling?
>
>As we've mentioned, a parsed document may have a different number of
>pseudoelements after parsing according to whether validation is switched
>on or off.  Therefore unless *that* problem is solved, I think the current
>problem is insoluble.

The problem is, that if that is so, then CHILD(N) is useless for addressing
PCDATA in all cases.

>Note that we can always identify mixed content even from WF documents.
>So is the question:
>	should we abandon CHILD(N) completely
>OR
>	should CHILD(N) be undefined if one or more elements are #PCDATA?
>
>I would NOT like to abandon CHILD(N) for element content.  It's perfectly
>reasonable to write:
>
><PARENT>
><DAUGHTER/>
><SON/>
><DAUGHTER/>
></PARENT>
>
>and ask for CHILD(2).  It would be very difficult if we lose this.
>
>	P.

Are you addressing the EMTPY tag <son/>?  If so, I didn't think that we
were proposing to lose it. The problem is only with pseudo-elements, not
CHILD per se.

But you raise the point that would be perfectly plausible to have markup like:
<PARENT>
<DAUGHTER/>
Julie
<SON/>
Joe
<DAUGHTER/>
Melissa
</PARENT>



and address "Julie" as CHILD(2).

If we bag pseudo elements (even the way I suggested, by concatenating them
all together), we lose that.

Fromn you other posts, It looks as though MathML would need something
similar to the above, to address PCDATA chunks between <SEP/>s. And this
seems a very legitimate need.

  -- 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/
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Received on Wednesday, 21 May 1997 14:05:07 UTC