[Slightly OT] attribute value length limits

[Lynne A. Price]

Jakob,
   I have to agree with Marcus, that attributes of that length are in the 
least unusual. Still, exceeding a quantity should result in invalid SGML, 
but not truncate the export. I therefore suspect you are bumping up against 
an implementation dependency of some sort.
   The relevant quantities are:

ATTSPLEN (normalized length of a start-tag's attribute specification list)
LITLEN (which applies to the length of an attribute value after entity and 
character references within it are interpreted)
NORMSEP (used to separate values in a list-valued attribute)
TAGLEN (length of a start-tag)

The Dev Guide says that ATTSPLEN, LITLEN, and TAGLEN can be increased up to 
30 times their values in the reference concrete syntax (respectively, 960, 
240, and 960).
         --Lynne



At 03:04 AM 12/15/2005, mcarr at allette.com.au wrote:
>Jakob Fix wrote:
>
> > I am doing some testing for export of a Frame (7.1) document to XML and
> > SGML.  I am particularly interested in the maximum length of attribute
> > values.  I found that there's not really a limit when exporting to XML
> > (I tried 5kb of text).  However, when exporting to SGML, it only exports
> > the first 511 (!) bytes, not even 512.
>
>Yebbut... why? I've never seen an attribute value that size. If I had a
>value that big, I'd be looking for some further breakdown of it. Are you
>sure that big a chunk is necessary to assist in the description of the
>element?
>
> > I do seem to remember that this value can be fixed/increased in the
> > SGML declaration, however I can't find any documentation on which
> > keyword corresponds to attribute value length.  I tried LITLEN,
> > ATTSPLEN, and some others, but even their current values are not set
> > to 511 (or 512).  Or is this limitation to be looked for elsewhere?
>
>Some things can be changed in the SGML Declaration but the change won't be
>reflected in FrameMaker. I would have thought that LITLEN would be the one
>to change.


Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com            http://www.txstruct.com
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