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Re: An unclear point with W3C XML 1.0 Specification

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: An unclear point with W3C XML 1.0 Specification
• From: Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@r...>
• Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:35:08 -0800
• In-reply-to: <1104986792.41dcc2a835b87@65.39.203.11>
• References: <20050106042113.CF2B828C04D@m...> <1104986792.41dcc2a835b87@65.39.203.11>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

Nothing personal, but this is rather strange XML. Why not use a 
part_description element:

   <product_item>
     <part_description>3 1/2" Spanner</part_description>
     ...
   </product_item>

or attribute:

   <product_item part_description="3 1/2&quot; Spanner">
      ...
   </product_item>

Note that the latter case uses the pre-defined quot entity to avoid 
having the inches mark be interpreted as the end of the attribute. XML 
defines an apos (apostrophe) entity as well.

-- Ron

david.lyon@c... wrote:
> Hi Collin,
> 
> If you are talking about the traditional xml spec I may
> not be the best person to explain it.
> 
> However what we do with our string literals is "properly"
> escape them. That is, have a scheme to embed double quotations
> and other noxious characters in a way that doesn't cause a
> problem to the parser.
> 
> It happens all the time, especially with power tools. eg:
> 
>  <product_item>
>    part_description&="3 1/2^" Spanner"
>  </product_item>
> 
> What we do, is use the ^ character to escape. But there
> may be other preferences.
> 
> So after reading out the value, what is returned is:
> 
>  3 1/2" Spanner
> 
> It's pretty simple but works without hiccups.

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    • From: "Collin Hsu" <collin@w...>
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