Conditional marked sections

Andrew Greene agreene at bitstream.com
Mon Aug 18 15:52:29 BST 1997


Please forgive what I hope will turn out to be a foolish question, but
upon rereading the XML spec, I was left unclear on the question of
whether marked sections could be used in the document instance for
anything except CDATA.

That is, in full SGML, you can say:

    <!DOCTYPE example [
      <!Element example - - ANY>
    ]>
    <example>
    This is a <![include[marked]]> section.
    </example>

and when you run it through nsgmls, you get:

    (EXAMPLE
    -This is a marked section.
    )EXAMPLE
    C

But the XML spec implies that conditional inclusion of marked sections
is only approved for the DTD, and not for the document instance itself;
and that the only legal use of marked sections in the document instance
is for CDATA. It is also implied that parameter entities are also only
valid within the DTD itself.

So, which is it? I'll admit that I'll be disappointed if conditional
marked sections are restricted to the DTD.

Thanks,
  Andrew Greene


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