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Amy, hello! On 13 Jul 2018, at 2:29, Amelia A Lewis wrote: Ah no, you're not getting away that easily. That specifies that order is constrained _in the source document_, but it is magisterially silent on the order in which those elements are presented to the processing application. If the parser wants to save up all of the <strong> elements and deliver them in a big reveal at the end, with trumpets, then who are we to deny it its god-given right to do so?! The quality of syntax is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from tag-salad, upon the application beneath.Hmmmm. On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 01:01:17 +0100, Norman Gray wrote:On 12 Jul 2018, at 15:58, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:Yes. We saw this also back in Perl days, with some XML libraries using It is, I suppose, merely an implication that a documented validated byBut is that written down?! (plus a couple more !! for good luck) Of course, at this point I start to feel like the rather desperate lawyer saying 'but your honour, the legislation doesn't actually _say_ that drink-driving remains illegal if my... if a driver were at the same time wearing a clown wig and playing the national anthem on the kazoo (and whilst I appreciate my client's latest address to the court may have been too slurred to be readily intelligible, your honour should infer no animadversions from the admittedly unfortunate gestures which accompanied it)' A somewhat stronger doubt might be thrown by suggesting that since DTDI think that the 'problem' here is that the XML spec is almost entirely concerned with the syntax of the source document, and says remarkably little about its semantics. That's because the semantics of a parse are so obvious, and the semantics of a pointy-bracket parse so immediately in the SGML background of most folk reading the XML spec at that time, that it would be merely obfuscatory to rehearse them. I think XML was trying to hum a different practical tune from the high-minded legalism of ISO 8879 and friends. [...] and who insisted What can one say? Except: loading-bay -- bare-knuckles -- now! I think I have cleansed my head of the memory of what it actually did, but I suspect that it was originally intended for parsing XML configuration files (let's not start...), and thus used in contexts where document order didn't matter.I can't imagine how the Perl code you describe handled mixed content, though. Did it just not support it? Concatenate all the text nodes (or better: throw away all the text nodes after the first, or replace the m_text members value with each new text node, effectively discarding all but the last) and set them as an m_text member, separate from the m_children hash, which contained only elements? And how did it distinguish between replacing a child versus multiple children of the same name? Oh, well ... long ago, in a different country, and the code is dead, I suppose. As so often happens, exasperation found expression in a wall of text, which resulted in <http://text.nxg.me.uk/2010/1yfs>. That, as so often happens, "fell deadborn from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
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