- From: Holger Wahlen <wahlen@ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 02:24:34 +0200
- To: www-html@w3.org
Responding to Neil St. Laurent, Paul Prescod wrote: | > Putting the additional * on seems to break the content model because | > now technically we're allowed zero or more and an already possibly | > empty PCDATA. | | I don't see any problem with 0 or more of 0 or more | characters. This is also valid: | | <!element TEST - - ((((#PCDATA)*)*)*)> I don't see any problem with this either, nor do I see why there should be any asterisks at all then; because of the latter, I support Dave Raggett's proposal to replace (#PCDATA)* by (#PCDATA) in the DTD consistently (posted on Monday). By the way, this is not only a question of consequence, but there's also a, let's say, didactic aspect. As you may remember, I asked whether there's a difference between the two here on Saturday; the reason why I was in doubt was that all SGML introductions I've seen only use (#PCDATA) in their example content models, while I kept finding (#PCDATA)* in the HTML DTDs. Confusing for an SGML beginner like me, hence I thought there might be some subtle difference I failed to see - that #PCDATA might really mean one or more characters, for example. I think it could help other newbies if that simple change was made, and perhaps also a remark that #PCDATA can also mean 0 characters was added to the HTML specs. Speaking about that, is there a way to require at least one character? After all, if TITLE doesn't need to have any actual content, for instance, where's the use of its being mandatory? ____ |__| / Holger // mailto:wahlen@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de ____ | |/|/ Wahlen // http://www.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de/~wahlen/
Received on Tuesday, 29 July 1997 20:24:38 UTC