There's nothing intrisically wrong with <a b c d> as an idea except that it
is a special case of command parsing that WILL break existing parsers, much
more than <param> usage, as discussed in my previous message, would.
You just said "There are very few existing text/enriched parsers",
so why is this a problem?
Mainly because it radically alters the syntax for commands, for something
that may not be useful for quite a while, if ever. So, some implementors
may feel uneasy parsing command formats that have no use at the moment. The
<param> block method (skip till you get </param>) is somewhat cleaner in
how current implementations will cope with future additions.
Now I'm a newbe to SGML, well ... I've been watching it for
several years, but only recently started coding for it, so I may be
all wet with this goal. John? You seem to know it pretty well.
I'd also be interested in knowing how SGML treats "to be defined later"
parameter blocks. Is it necessary to set out an entire DTD ahead of time,
or can "holes" be left for arbitrary material?
Cheers,
Rhys.