Re: [xml-dev] Why is the > symbol a reserved character?

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

On 09/07/2010 13:57, Michael Kay wrote:
> n attribute values, > is reserved, which is pretty pointless, and this
> is entirely due to SGML legacy, which allows the quotes around the
> attribute value to be omitted.

You mean  < here rather than > (which can be used in attribute values)
I think the main reason for not allowing < in attribute values is that
it saves explaining over and over again that
title="<b>this</b> title"
is the same as
title="&lt;b>this&lt;/b> title"
rather than having a marked up string in an attribute. making it 
syntactically impossible stops people being lead astray. Although in 
practice it probably just makes people think xml syntax is arcane, and 
stick with html syntax where anything's allowed, but doesn't always mean 
what you expect it to mean.

 > Why is ]]> reserved when you're not in a CDATA section? I don't know
in SGML there were more marked sections than just CDATA (cf INCLUDE and 
IGNORE which are restricted to DTDs in XML) if you know ]]> doesn't 
appear in content then you can safely mark an entire range with a marked 
section and not have the range be unexpectedly terminated. Keeping the 
restriction in XML is pretty odd though:-)

David


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