[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: XML & SGML

• From: Paul Prescod <papresco@t...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 19:32:09 -0400

Conleth O'Connell wrote:
> 
> The XML instance might look like:
> 
> <!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "http://mycom.com/f.dtd" [
> <!ENTITY % bar "baz | car | xyzzy">
> ]>
> 
> <foo><xyzzy/></foo>

Note that this sort of trickery is poorly supported by SGML editors. They
like to think of a DTD as a single immutable thing that spans documents
(as users do). But technically, DTDs are really just properties of
documents, and documents can fiddle with them as you demonstrate above. I
think that I would advise against depending on this sort of fiddling until
we see whether XML editors are smarter (or at least more compliant) in
this regard than their old-SGML counterparts.

This one feature probably makes implementation of an efficient, friendly
XML editor harder than most of the features that were eliminated from SGML
(omittag, shorttag and rank put together are comparatively trivial...).
The other hard feature is entity references in attribute values (yipes!
try to make a simple, friendly MFC dialog box that handles *that*
properly).

 Paul Prescod  - 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/
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...)

• References:
  • Re: XML & SGML
    • From: "W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@i...>
  • Re: XML & SGML
    • From: Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@s...>
  • Re: XML & SGML
    • From: "Conleth O'Connell" <cso@v...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Parents and children (was RFD: comp.text.xml)
• Next by Date: Re: XML & SGML
• Previous by thread: Re: XML & SGML
• Next by thread: Re: XML & SGML
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread