Article:		Named Character Elements for XML
Subject:		Many elements...
Date:		2003-01-06 07:42:51
From:		David Carlisle
Having many extra elements (around 2000 more if you did this for MathML rather than XHTML) does cause some problems if you do wish to validate the document at any point using schema or dtd. Even if the end result is delivered as (just) well formed XML it is often useful to have a dtd to constrain authoring. Some drafts of MathML2 had a <mchar name="..."> element that had similar effect to this xmlchar proposal, but used a single element with an attribute. Docbook has a more or less similar uchar proposal. This has a much less drastic impact on a dtd (especially if the DTD doesn't constrain the name values) For these reasons mchar was removed from MathML2 at last call. It was understood that XML core WG would look at the problem. The "XML Core WG View" document being the rather unsatisfactory outcome....

Previous Message

Next Message

• Many elements...
  2003-01-08 02:24:28 Anthony Coates [Reply]
  
  Actually, I would have thought 2000 elements would be manageable these days. The whole of Unicode in one include file would be a problem. However, we built xmlchar so that you don't have to include all of the HTML4 characters unless you want them all. Similarly, nobody is going to use all 2000 MathML characters in one document, so grouping them into, say, 10 groups would make them manageable using the xmlchar approach. I'm a physicist by training, and used LaTeX for years, so I'm quite familiar with what is required for mathematical typesetting. Cheers, Tony.