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At 2004-10-22 03:34 -0700, James William Pye wrote:
>Yes, I do have something specific in mind, a pair of PIs:
>
><?xml-entity name='ent' value='val'?>
>and
><?xml-entities type='text/xml-dtd' href='someURI'?>
><?xml-entities type='text/xml-entities' href='someURI.xml'?>
Processing instructions exist to communicate with the processing
application, yet entities are an aspect of the syntax and processing
applications never see the syntax, only the XML processor in processing
applications see the syntax.
Moreover, no XML file with entity references using the above declarations
would be well-formed because existing XML processors seeing the entity
references would not have associated XML 1.0 or XML 1.1 declarations for
them. Therefore, you cannot call such a file an XML file.
An example of where a standardized PI is used is stylesheet association
http://www.w3.org/1999/06/REC-xml-stylesheet-19990629 where the processing
application has the choice of following up on the "hint" and has nothing to
do with the syntactic representation of the information.
An example of where new standardized processing is proposed before
application processing is XInclude
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-xinclude-20040930 yet this is done without
violating any syntactic restrictions of an XML document and only adds a
processing model so that applications with processors respecting XInclude
will produce the same result information set in advance of the application
acting on the information.
>With the many validation mechanisms available today, it seems a bit
>obtuse to rely solely on DTDs for sources of entities.
Ummmmmmm ... with an existing method of doing entities why introduce a
different way of doing them? Any different way would be an incompatible
way. Your proposed way would render all existing XML processors incapable
of reading the document, since you've violated syntactic rules that are
already standardized. It wouldn't be XML.
Examples like stylesheet association and XInclude add features and
functionality without breaking anything.
I hope this helps.
............................... Ken
--
World-wide on-site corporate, govt. & user group XML/XSL training.
G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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