[forwarded by Liam] [Comment by Brandon Barnes]

I was reading "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition)" and 
came across the following text: (you may need to turn off word wrap in order 
to read it)

[9]    EntityValue    ::=    '"' ([^%&"] | PEReference | Reference)* '"'
   |  "'" ([^%&'] | PEReference | Reference)* "'"
[10]    AttValue    ::=    '"' ([^<&"] | Reference)* '"'
   |  "'" ([^<&'] | Reference)* "'"
[11]    SystemLiteral    ::=    ('"' [^"]* '"') | ("'" [^']* "'")
[12]    PubidLiteral    ::=    '"' PubidChar* '"' | "'" (PubidChar - "'")* 
"'"
[13]    PubidChar    ::=    #x20 | #xD | #xA | [a-zA-Z0-9] | 
[-'()+,./:=?;!*#@$_%]

I was able to understand a bit of it from the context, such as * and | but ^ 
and & were foreign to me. It was neccessary in order to understand the 
document. I figured this was some sort of w3c specific code that I needed to 
read.

I eventually found the definition of these "terms". You should have provided 
some sort of link. Next document, perhaps?

I know how this got past your editors. You hired professionals, people who 
already knew what you meant and breezed over it without giving a second 
thought to the people who had no idea what these characters stood for.

I'm just trying to make the web a little cleaner and easier.


In this case, a simple link to "Section 6" would have been great, saving me 
personally and possibly others time.

-Brandon Barnes

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Received on Tuesday, 1 October 2002 14:06:59 UTC