Re: SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

> I've always been very curious to know what the rationale for that
> is. To me, a major part of what the infoset was supposed to be about
> was to draw the line between logically significant information and
> purely lexical information. The current version fails to achieve this.

(Not an official statement, just my recollection of the history.)

Some people certainly expected the Infoset to draw such a line.  On
the other hand, some people wanted it to contain all the information
that might be needed by an XML editor, much of which is certainly not
"logically significant".  This difference arose in many forms during
the development of the spec.

Eventually, we wimped out and took a more pragmatic approach, making
the usefulness of features to other specifications the primary
criterion for inclusion.  The XPath data model was particularly
important in this, since it has been incorporated either explicitly or
by "transitive closure" in other specs.

So the short answer, which is really of course just a rationalization,
is that comments are in the Infoset because they're in XPath.

-- Richard