Joerg, Aside from the ambiguity Arved has highlighted concerning the use of the term "code point", I was thinking about the recent decision to hack the spec so that 'format="1."' becomes acceptable. I already find the automatic conversion of NCNames to strings distasteful enough. Users develop bad habits from that sort of under-the-hood convenience, and that leads to loud complaints about all those fussy quotes when they become essential.
If I take <character> to be a string literal of length 1, the automatic conversion of NCNames of length 1 would allow, say, <fo:character character="A"/> So when users try <fo:character hyphenation-character="-"/> they are understandably upset when the parser barfs. My inclination is to do away with the automatic conversion and specifically allow an NCName (with explicit conversion) alongside a literal when it is considered safe, as it is not in the case of <character> or format. After all, <string> and <character> don't occur all that frequently. See below. J.Pietschmann wrote: > > According to 5.11 "Property Datatypes", the value is a single > unicode character. I believe the representation is a > unceremonial single unicode character, or an NCName whose > string representation has the length 1. I'd parse such > attributes as an expression resulting in a string, and > bomb if the string is longer than 1. > This would accept > character="'a'" > character="1 + 1" > character="from-parent('font-size') - 12" > which may upset purist, or not. > An alternative would be to use a custom parser, which accepts > either a single character (NCName of length 1) or any of the > functions inherited-property-value(NCName), > from-parent( NCName), from-nearest-specified-value( NCName) > and from-table-column( NCName) > (might even make a bit of sense for hyphenation-char and > for fo:character's character in very, very strange cases) A custom parser should not be necessary. The <character> restriction could be expressed as a constraint on the <string> result, checked at the property level. > Just for curiosity: what should happen if the following snippet > is used: > <fo:page-sequence master-reference="font-size" font-size="20pt"> > <fo:flow font-size="from-parent(from-parent('master-reference'))"/> This looks OK. Peter -- Peter B. West [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/ "Lord, to whom shall we go?" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]