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Joe English wrote: > But even SGML doesn't require conforming systems to report > this condition; [4.267] says an ambiguous content model is not > a "reportable markup error". > > (That's probably because nobody knew *how* to detect this condition > until 1992 when Anne Bruegemann-Klein figured it out, but still...) Lots of people knew how to detect it, but they all did it differently. Bruegemann-Klein's great contribution was to provide a rigorous definition for the condition. (She then went on to show that if a grammar was deterministic by her definition, a DFA could be built for it in linear time. That was pretty nice, too.) > Anyway, AIUI the consensus in the SGML world was that > the prohibition against ambiguous content models was > overly restrictive and unnecessary. That W3C XML Schema > retained the restriction was a big mistake, IMO, one > that could easily have been avoided by not conflating > validation with annotation. You are so right. Look where it got us. XML Schema. Strongly typed XQuery. Bob Foster
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