xml-dev - Re: XML - NG

[David LeBlanc <whisper@accessone.com>]

Ok, I see I misspoke myself out of not understanding some things that have
been pointed out about the various meanings of CDATA. I never whould have
realized (well, not anytime soon), that attribute CDATA wasn't the same as
other types of CDATA. Thanks.

What I would like is a content type (call it UPDATA), that has a distinct
start and stop tag (<UPDATA> ..... </UPDATA>) that is entirely unparsed.
This would be useful for content that has lots of significant characters..
like xml itself. In fact, I was thinking that it could be <CDATA>....
</CDATA>, but I now realize that there's a lot of freight attached to that
character combination :-).

It seems blechy to have to declare content PCDATA and then do the <[CDATA[
... ]]> thing in the document. It forces the author of a document rather
then the designer of a document class to be responsible for "escaping"
content.

Dave LeBlanc

At 07:27 PM 1/13/99 -0400, Steve DeRose wrote:
>At 3:45 AM -0400 2/6/99, David LeBlanc wrote:
>>At a minimum, a couple of things i'd like to see are CDATA element content
>>and CDATA attribute content.
>
>CDATA element content was one of the most-hated features of SGML (mainly
>because of the rules about how they end). But more importantly, adding it
>would remove one of the most important advantages (to my mind) of XML: you
>could no longer correctly parse a document without the DTD -- since you'd
>never know whether that "<" you just found was a delimiter or data. I
>discuss this at length in The SGML FAQ Book, along with the rationale that
>ultimately underlies many of XML's other choices (probably should have put
>"XML" in the title, since most of it talks about XML motivation anyway).
>
>As for CDATA attributes, I thought we had those. Now, "CDATA" for
>attributes doesn't mean "entities aren't recognized" in them -- but it
>doesn't mean that in SGML either. So if that's what you were hoping for,
>there's no way to get it without pitching the nice property that XML is an
>SGML subset -- SGML has no way to suppress delimiter recognition in
>attributes (except perhaps the MS[IOS]CHAR function characters, which I
>have never seen used, and doubt most SGML implementations actually
>implement).
>
>Just my $0.02.
>
>Steve
>
>
>Steven_DeRose@Brown.edu; http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
>Chief Scientist, Scholarly Technology Group, and
>   Adjunct Associate Professor, Brown University;
>Chief Scientist, Inso Corporation
>
>
>
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