RE: emitting comments

["Frank A. Christoph" <christo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Carlisle wrote:
> >  Is this a bug or a feature?
>
> feature.
>
> The first thing that happens to a dsssl script is that it is parsed as
> SGML so <!-- ... is a comment. If you want to put the characters <!--
> into a string then you can either concatenate two strings, as you did,
> or use character entities rather than literal character data, so the
> parser sees them as character data rather than markup.

I think it is a misfeature. It confuses people more often than not.

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> And a small advantage of dsssl over xsl is that you can derive a dtd
> for your style-sheets from the dsssl architecture which uses cdata
declared
> content for the style-specification-body to avoid the whole problem.
> xml doesn't allow that. Or is this impossible for some reason ?

At least XSL is consistent on the syntax issue, although I find it almost
impossible to read.

David Carlisle wrote:
> Yes, you can, but what has never really been clear to me was _why_ dsssl
> was defined as an sgml application rather than a lisp-ish one.
> I  know that as defined some of the top level forms require SGML notation

Which ones are you talking about?

> But would it have been impossible for those to have used lisp syntax
> too? What was the overriding reason for having dsssl as an sgml
> architecture at all?

What, didn't you know? Everything in the world must be reduced to SGML or
it's not useful.

No one disputes the idea that Scheme needs a module system, but doing it via
SGML is like using a hockey stick to bat a baseball.

--FC


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