On 13/03/15 18:01, Raffaele Viglianti wrote:
It seems to me that there are two conflicting interpretations of defaultVal at play:
1: defaultVal indicates that an optional attribute will be provided by a parser with the given default value
That is exactly and only what it means. Specifically (as I said on the ticket) an SGML parser is required, and other parsers may be configured, to treat the input stream <p> as if it read <p complete="YES">
2: defaultVal indicates that when the attribute is not present, the definition of the element is affected *as if* the optional attribute were provided with the given value.
What on earth does this mean? The definition of the *element* is what it says in its <desc> : there might be cases where we agree that <foo type="bar"> means something slightly different from <foo type="dingo"> but the definition *of the element* remains unchanged.