xml-dev - Re: Common XML (was Re: Document Feature Requirements)

[Sean McGrath <sean@digitome.com>]

[David Megginson]
>
>You might be a little overly optimistic in assuming that any markup
>has good survival characteristics in the general case -- it's the
>model that matters, not the markup.

I have read the above 5 times now and I'm afraid it has gone
over my head. Can you explain what you mean by this?

[Simon Laurent]
>
> > [Side note: XSLT's defaults for PIs and comments, to me, say a lot
> > indirectly about the 'robustness' of PIs and comments, especially in
> > contrast to the rules for elements: The built-in template rule for
> > processing instructions and comments is to do nothing.  <xsl:template
> > match="processing-instruction()|comment()"/>]
>
[David Megginson]
>That's seriously misleading -- the built-in templates also strip out
>start and end tags recursively:
>
>  <xsl:template match="*|/">
>   <xsl:apply-templates/>
>  </xsl:template>
>
>By that argument, only character data is safe and tags should also be
>avoided (except the required tags around the document element, of
>course, but they will have to be regenerated every time).
>
>Note that none of this is meant to say that there's anything special
>about PIs that make them wonderful, or that people should rush out to
>use them, but I think that this whole discussion has been way off
>focus.
>

Lets stop talking about PIs. When it comes to round
tripping issues, the stars of the show are comments,
CDATA sections, document type declaration subsets,
and expanded entity references. 

These are the things that I believe merit inclusion
in an XML features manifest so that mere mortals
can build more robust XML processing software.

regards,



Sean,




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