xml-dev - Re: SAX and delayed entity loading

[John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>]

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> If this isn't the case, notations and unparsed entities are a nuisance,
> providing functionality that duplicates that provided by other tools in a
> format all its own.

I think it is important to distinguish between the use of unparsed
entities (which involves notations) and the use of notations.
Notations that govern elements through the use of a NOTATION attribute
are a powerful feature for describing
the syntax of what's in the element, as is shown by the repeated
attempts to reinvent them in various schema proposals.  As stated in my reply to Eliot, they
provide a distributed registry as opposed to the centralized registry
plus private use mechanism of MIME, but sacrifice MIME's declarative
features that allow partial interpretation of unknown types.
 
> How
> would I apply a MIME type to an attribute?  More important, why one earth
> would I want to?  Seems like some pretty heavy overkill.

To say what the internal syntax of the attribute value is.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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