John Cowan's comments on guidelines-04

[John Cowan <jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Section 4.2 says:

> Processing instructions can be ignored by processors because they are
> not part of a document's character data.

This is flatly contravened by the XML 1.0 Recommendation (2nd ed.),
Section 2.6:

# PIs are not part of the document's character data, but must be passed
# through to the application.

Therefore, the conclusions in Section 4.2, namely:

> As a consequence, it is
> recommended that processing instructions be ignored when encountered
> in normal protocol processing.  It is thus also recommended that
> processing instructions not be used to define normative protocol data
> structures or extensions.

are without foundation and should be removed.

=====

Section 4.9 should be extended to point out that control characters
in content that is being XMLized can and should be replaced by
appropriate markup.  For example, FF could be replaced by a
<pagebreak/> empty-tag.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_