From: "Joe English" <>
> Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> >
> > SGML is more of a DAG, because of CONREF. Sharing branches
> > is one thing XML gave up.
>
> Actually, that's not what CONREF does.
>
> The only significance of attributes with default value
> CONREF is that at most one such attribute may be specified
> in a start-tag, and if one is, the element is not allowed
> to have any content.
The significance of CONREF is in ISO 8879
"4.57 content reference (attribute): An impliable attribute whose value is
referenced by the application to generate data content. NOTE: When an
element has an explicit content reference, the element's content in the
document instance must be empty."
The plain name says it: a reference to content: hence the DAG connection.
That it is the application's job to do the branch sharing is fine: it is the
application's job to build and present the in-memory structure or stream
in any case.
> Attributes with REFID declared value and CONREF default
> value are sometimes used to _encode_ DAGs, but that's purely
> an application convention. CONREFness and REFIDhood aren't
> even reflected in the ESIS.
Well, that is something to take up with the designer of ESIS, I guess :-)
Omnimark makes it trivial to assess whether some content is CONREFed,
something like
ELEMENT x
...
OUTPUT REFERENT zz WHEN
CONTENT IS CONREF
...
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
