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

Re: Error and Fatal Error

• From: Olivier Jeulin <olivier.jeulin@gmail.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:21:33 +0200

Le 17/07/2011 00:18, Richard Salz a écrit :
> Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote on 07/16/2011 03:32:16 PM:
> > or it could allow "&" to represent itself if not followed
> > by a name character.
>
> Then whitespace becomes significant
>         foo<bar
>         foo < bar
>         foo< bar
>         foo <bar

It is already. To define a start tag, "<" can't be followed by a space  
" ", so
   foo < bar
   foo< bar
could (and I think should) be valid XML and be equal to
   foo &amp bar
   foo&amp bar

In fact, "<" not followed by a valid start tag character 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#NT-NameStartChar) should 
represent the "<" character.
As a user, I think it's a *lot* more readable, and could avoid quite a 
lot of XML errors (especially on the web).

By the way, XSLT programmers would benefit a lot of this:
   select="$a << $b"  instead of   select="$a &lt;&lt; $b"
   test="$sum < 100"  instead of   select="$sum &lt; 100"
:)

Even if "foo < bar" was not always serialized as "foo < bar", if every 
parser understands this new norm, a converter could be used to generate 
this "compact syntax".

• References:
  • Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Joe Fawcett <joefawcett@hotmail.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Re: Error and Fatal Error
    • From: Richard Salz <rsalz@us.ibm.com>