Re: [xml-dev] Invalid Markup in External DTD conditionals

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org>]

On Tue, 2023-07-25 at 01:14 +0100, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>  Why is the ignore section not expected to be valid 
> declarations like an <![INCLUDE[]]> section? 

So you can use an IGNOREd marked section to "comment out" problems,
incomplete declarations, or even non-XML text. I think the SGML rule
that the IGNOREd marked section must be syntactically valid was seen as
pointlessly onerous, although it does also mean you know you won't get
syntax errors if you change the values.

XML does not have nested comments. Neither did SGML, unfortunately; i
wanted us to use <!--* .... *--> for XML comments, and allow -- inside
them. But i think this failed because there was no way SGML was ever
going to change for something an upstart like XML... and was not
revisited when that changed.

As to requiring the start and end tokens to be in the same entity,
that's to preclude some parsing tricks people used to use with SGML
that made the files impossible to process without a DTD, and uselessly
hard to handle in other software.

But it was all a long time ago now, and i no longer have access to the
email archives at W3C.

liam


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