[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XML design: why is > allowed in attribute value?
I've been wondering something about the design of XML. Why are unencoded greater-than (">") characters allowed in attribute values? I would have thought that greater-than characters inside a tag (that is, excluding the one terminating the tag) would have been disallowed, to make it easy for a scanner to identify the ends of tags without having to parse attributes and their quotation characters. XML does require that less-than characters in attribute values be encoded. It seems that the purpose of this requirement was to make it easy to identify the beginnings of tags by simply finding less-than characters, without having to keep track of whether they appear in attribute-value quotes and therefore don't actually signal tags. (Yes, I'm ignoring comments and CDATA sections.) Is that reasoning correct? If so, why wouldn't greater-than characters be treated similarly, to similarly simplify finding the ends of tags? (Yes, I know a full parser has to parse everything, but some applications (e.g., syntax highlighting) might just want to identify the beginnings and ends of tags.) Curiously, Daniel -- Daniel Barclay Digital Focus Daniel.Barclay@d...
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