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Re: SGML queries

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: SGML queries
• From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 22:27:31 +0000
• In-reply-to: <3D7E71E0.2050303@a...>
• References: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E430752B92C@HQ5> <3D7E71E0.2050303@a...>

Marcus Carr <mcarr@a...> wrote:

| You haven't spent enough time around ugly (read "cost effective by 
| coding alone") markup jobs then. I've used omissable start and end tags 
| more times than I could count - the classic situation is for turning 
| something like:

Shades of QWERTY and (old) LinuxDoc!

|    <section>Laundry basket
|    <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
| 
| into something like:
| 
|    <section>
|    <title>Laundry basket</title>
|    <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...
| 
| It's intuitive, equivalent and less markup.

... until the time someone innocently leaves the title blank.

:  <section>
:    <para>The laundry basket has a long and fascinating history...

This throws a validation error (<title> is not omissible if the element
has no content.)  

Some people may try to "fix" this kind of problem - sometimes you really
can't think of a title - with pernicious mixed content:

  <!ELEMENT section - - (#PCDATA,para+) >

Except, that would bomb too, whenever a user innocently added a </para>
somewhere and started a new <para> on the next line...

Eventually, to keep the SGML gremlins away, it becomes prudent to specify

  <!ELEMENT title - o  (#PCDATA) >

| I'm surprised that there's so little enthusiasm for this - 

We all learn the hard way...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: SGML queries
    • From: Marcus Carr <mcarr@a...>

• References:
  • RE: SGML queries
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Re: SGML queries
    • From: Marcus Carr <mcarr@a...>

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