not just ANY error

I can not find any semantics for the terminal "ANY" as used in
production 46 "contentspec". I presume it means the same as in ISO
8879:
    ANY means the content model is an optional and repeatable or
    group whose members are "#PCDATA" and all of the GIs
    specified as element types in the same document type
    definition.
        -- Goldfarb, p. 411
(Of course, this can be simplified in XML because an optional and
repeatable or group with #PCDATA and some number of GIs is exactly
what "Mixed" (production 51) means.)

Since the percent sign is not allowed in an entity declaration, it
would be nice if &percent; were one of the magic entities that XML
processors must recognize whether declared or not. I realize that it
isn't the same level of requirement as the others (which are needed
to escape markup that cannot appear in content, whereas percent sign
is only prohibited in a certain context in the DTD -- and it is
reasonable to assume that if you go to the trouble of learning how to
write a DTD it's no big deal to learn to use % or whatever),
but nonetheless I think it's a good idea. (Of course, I'd also like
to see =, and perhaps even [ and ] as magic entities,
too. :-)

Received on Friday, 21 May 1999 17:05:19 UTC