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Tim Bray wrote: > > At 10:13 PM 3/24/99 +0100, Ronald Bourret wrote: > >I wasn't even going to reply, but then I remembered that the real question > >here is whether SAX (not the DOM) should tell people about CDATA sections. > > I think the answer is yes. > > The implication is that a parser that doesn't pass on word of CDATA > sections is a second-rate parser. Hrummph. It isn't second-rate it is probably just optimized for speed instead of fidelity. > Is this not a slippery- > slope that puts us on the road to reporting whether single or double > quotes were used for attribute values? -Tim The way to avoid the slippery slope is to define an information set. Had the information set been defined before the DOM (or, even better, before XML 1.0 went to REC) then the DOM creators would have known what the right answer is. In this case they were forced to guess and IMHO they guessed wrong. Lesson: Information sets should follow close on the heals of syntactic standards or should be incorporated into the syntactic standards. RDF gets this right. Will XLink? What about future versions of CSS? Also: Different types of applications need different amounts of information. Therefore an information set should support different levels of granularity. The groves model does this through "grove plans." Some parsers provide grove plans that allow a character-for-character round-tripping. Others provide what we used to call "ESIS." -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco "Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10 years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or a civilization." - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10124.html xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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