Re: [xml-dev] Yet Alternative "character entity" proposal

[Robin LaFontaine <robin@deltaxml.com>]

Eric,

I like this especially because the expansion of the entities can be 
done at any time and is not done every time the file is read in. A 
frequent need is to process XML and preserve the entities: not 
expanding them is the simplest way to do this!

This means (from our point of view doing comparisons and representing 
changes as XML) that we can find changes to 'entities' and keep these 
represented as 'entities', expanding only when we want to. Then we 
can merge and sync XML files and preserve the entities.

But one thing I do not follow is the use of the xhtml namespace for 
the entities, I would prefer to see a different namespace, e.g. so 
that instead of <nbsp/> we had <ents:nbsp/> or even <ents:entity 
name="nbsp"/> so that DTD/Schema for XHTML was not polluted by the 
entity names. They should be separate I think. But of course your 
scheme still works with this, it is a style issue and not fundamental.

Re: the expansion XSLT, why not process the entity declaration file 
to generate an xslt file with templates like this:

<xsl:template match="nbsp">&#160;</xsl:template>

and then use this to expand the document. I think it would be simpler 
and run much faster.

Robin La Fontaine

At 6:29 pm +0200 21/10/03, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>Simpler, what about something around those lines:
>
>Entity declaration:
>
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>...snip
>Eric 
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-- 
-- ---------------------------------------------------
Robin La Fontaine,
DeltaXML: "Change control for XML, in XML"
Email: robin@deltaxml.com      http://www.deltaxml.com