- From: Dave J Woolley <DJW@bts.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 19:03:17 -0000
- To: "'www-html@w3.org'" <www-html@w3.org>
> From: Dan Connolly [SMTP:connolly@w3.org]
>
> <mydoc>foo " bar</mydoc>
>
> " doesn't have the status of < and & in XML, because
> it doesn't need to; you can just write:
>
We were talking about parameter values (in particular
href). I'm also using XML to some extent as a surrogate
for the SGML ISO standard and because of HTML's migration
to XHTML. Real HTML, where this started, doesn't allow one
to add entities, or at least I'd be surprised to find
many browsers that supported it.
> > RCDATA appears not to be supported, meaning that
> > re-declaring %URI as RCDATA is no longer an option.
>
I partially confused the issues here because I
mistakenly thought that RCDATA was a valid type
for a parameter. It appears, that, at least for
XML, parameter CDATA is like SGML content RCDATA.
> again, no need:
>
> <mydoc aRef="http://example.com?q=abc"def"/>
>
This is not the case that I was considering. The
case was that of actually getting " as a value
for the parameter. From the other reply and section
3.3 of the XML specification (for the moment I shall
assume that this does not extend the SGML specification,
to which I only have second hand access) you can get
this value into a parameter by using &uot;
(NB the original problem didn't require this, it was
just to demonstrate an apparent lack of generality.)
Incidentally, section 2.4 is still confusing, as it
says "To allow attribue values to contain both single
and double quotes, the apstrophe or single-quote
character (') may be represented by '''....
The presence of this statement tends to imply a special
exception for ' and ", but not for &, whereas, once
section 3.3 is pointed out, it may just be mentioning
particular cases of the general case (although, without
&, not a self consistent subset). If the XML spec is
ever re-drafted, I think that this should either be taken
out, have a reference to section 3.3 added, or replaced
by a statement that attribute CDATA is treated differently
from CDATA sections, together with a reference to section 3.3.
> > Looks to me as though there is a serious conflict between
> > what is implemented and what is consistent with the
> > standards which are authorative in specific areas.
>
> How so?
>
If section 3.3 of the XML specification describes the
same behaviour as the ISO standard for SGML does, with
respect to CDATA attributes, then there isn't a problem.
Received on Tuesday, 23 November 1999 14:05:39 UTC