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At Tuesday, 26 June 2001, "Al B. Snell" <alaric@a...> wrote: [PIs] >Can they now be considered semi-deprecated? I hope not...you'd cripple the publishing industry and a large number of applications if they were blacklisted. Why would anyone want to deprecate them? I wrote: >> The whole point about PIs is that they are NOT part of the >> structure of the document. I should have made it clear that I meant the textual structure, in the way that a heading or a paragraph is. They're just a convenient method of storing information for passing on to a subsequent process in a way which does not upset the parser. >If they're not described in the DTD/Schema they can't be validated and >nice XML editors can't suggest which ones are legal in any situation. Is >this wise? Yes, absolutely. The identifying token which comes between the first question mark and the first white-space is something the user makes up, or which is defined by the application. There is no such thing as a list of legal values: they are intended to be transparent to editors and other XML-aware processors unless explicitly programmed otherwise as part of a specific application. They don't need to be in any DTD or Schema because they are a part of the document syntax, so they're built into XML at ground level. A "nice" XML editor can of course pop up a menu of values allowed by a specific application if the app designer adds the relevant stuff in macros or whatever technique the editor uses. The GRiF editor, for example, used (uses?) PIs extensively to allow the user to add abritrary font styling even across element boundaries, just like a wordprocessor does, by storing the font changes in PIs. That meant they were available to subsequent edit sessions so the document could be prettified for editing or printing, but had absolutely no effect on the normal processing of element/attribute/entity markup. ///Peter
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