Re: Input sought on datatyping tradeoff

[Drew McDermott
> We still have to have conventions to handle strings containing awkward
> characters such as angle brackets and quotes.  Here I don't know what
> to propose, because the SGML entity notation seems to be required, and
> it makes no sense to me.  (In XSLT, people are apparently willing to
> write "less than or equal" as "&lt;=" instead of "<=".  One would
> think the quotes would suffice to indicate that the "<" is not part of
> a tag, but the lexical conventions of SGML apparently trump the
> quotes, which come in only at the XML layer.  How is it that in, say,
> the Fortran world people have found a way for the language to evolve
> gracefully, and in the SGML world evolution is viewed as impossible?)

It is no different from using "\n" to embed a newline in a string.  You have
to have some way to say whether you are using a special character in its
special role or in its literal role.

Anyway it is a serialization matter that can be handled OK once agreement is
reached on the conventions for literal values.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Saturday, 13 July 2002 12:42:26 UTC