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At 8:49 PM -0800 2/3/02, Tim Bray wrote:
>But general parsed entities... yecch. Doing content aggregation
>at the lexical level feels wrong. They cause all sorts of
>baroque complexity in APIs. Non-validating parsers don't read
>them. They cause all sorts of complexity for ID/IDREF management,
>and they complicate namespace processing horribly. They are
>totally aimed at document/publishing applications of XML, and
>in my experience, they don't work that well there. Eliot Kimber
>was telling us 8 years ago that they were basically broken and
>we weren't smart enough to realise he was right.
>
But they're a really sweet syntax sugar when I can't remember the
exact keys to hit to get a curly quote, an em dash or an e with
accent acute. Can you imagine trying to sell XHTML to designers
without and ©?
The problems seem to lie beyond this, when larger parts of the
document are pulled in. The difference between external and internal
parsed entities may be relevant. I must admit I can't think of many
cases where I've seen external parsed entities used outside of
textbook examples.
Not that any of this can be fixed now. :-(
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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