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SP test release with improved XML support

• From: James Clark <jjc@j...>
• To: "XML Developers' List" <xml-dev@i...>, "SP Programmers' List" <sp-prog@c...>
• Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 18:15:30 +0700

The current Jade test release at ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/jade.zip
includes an experimental version of SP with more XML support.  Win32
binaries are also available at ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/test/jadew.zip.

A number of key features from the WebSGML SGML TC are supported (with
some differences from the balloted text):

- Unbundling of SHORTTAG

- HCRO delimiter (for hex numeric character references)

- Feature to allow elements declared EMPTY to have end-tags

- NESTC (net-enabling start tag close) delimiter (allows XML <e/> syntax
to be handled as a combination of a net-enabling start-tag "<e/" and a
null end-tag ">")

- Duplicate enumerated attribute tokens are allowed

- Relaxation of rules on use of parameter entity references inside
groups

- Support for multiple ATTLIST declarations for a single element type

- Support for ATTLIST declarations which don't declare any attributes

- Support for predefined single character entities in the SGML
declaration (lt, amp etc)

- Support for feature that turns off SGML's traditional record end rules
(WSCON KEEPALL)

You need to use the included SGML declaration for XML (pubtext/xml.dcl)
to take advantage of these features.  Note that this declaration
implements the recent decision to make XML case-sensitive.

There is also support for the XML encoding declaration and for XML's
rules on default selection of the encoding.  This is enabled by
specifying an encoding of "xml".  You can use

  set SP_ENCODING=xml
  set SP_CHARSET_FIXED=yes

to make this the default.  This will produce UTF-8 output by default;
you can override this with the -b option.

As in previous releases, use -wno-valid to turn off (some) validation,
and use -wxml to get warnings about violation of XML restrictions.

There are still some areas where SP does not conform to the current
state of XML, including:

- There is no support for draconian error handling (although it's easy
to build a layer on top of SP that enforces this)

- Line ends are normalized to \r\n rather than to \n

- No support for UTF-16 surrogates. This means you can't have numeric
character references outside the basic multilingual plane.

- XML's rules about < and & used as data always being entered with &lt;
and &amp; are not enforced by -wxml

- The -wno-valid option allows use of undefined elements and attributes
but still produces errors if you supply a definition but do not conform
to it

If you find others, please let me know.

This is a test release.  For production use, I recommend using SP 1.2.1.

James


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