Re: <\!> in doc comments?

[Matthias Clasen <clasen clasen home uni-freiburg de>]

Hi James,

you shouldn't try to process SGML with XML tools...
I wasn't aware that gtk-doc is going to move over
to xml. 

I introduced the empty declarations (ie <!>) in order
to suppress the IMO irritating links in examples, which 
are blindly inserted by the gtk-doc perl scripts for
anything which resembles the pattern g[a-z_]*(). In order
to suppress it, I needed to insert something between ( and )
which 
 - is not the empty string 
 - contributes the empty string to the SGML document after parsing

This leaves basically three possibilities:
 a) an entity with an empty replacement text (&empty;)
 b) a comment declaration (<!-- empty -->)
 c) an empty declaration  (<!>)
(there are some more possibilities when using more arcane SGML features)

I chose c), since it seemed the most elegant. Unfortunately it is
also the only possibility which is not valid XML. I would have probably 
been better to sacrifice elegance for interoperability and use a comment
declaration. 
 
Feel free to s/<!>/<!-- -->/g.

Matthias