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Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 10:20:42PM +0200, Toni Uusitalo wrote:
>>I guess that's inevitable progress to go and dump the DTDs.
>>There must be some research going on that measures when people are
>>ready to switch to the alternatives, I've no clue about this thing myself
>>(about usage numbers of DTDs or RelaxNG etc.).
>
> For a number of application areas (especially "document" related areas, as
> opposed to "data," for whatever that distinction is worth), there is
> currently no way to move away from DTDs, because entities cannot be defined
> except in DTDs (that's general parsed entities, not parameter entities or
> unparsed entities, which have narrower usage/appeal).
I do documents day-in day-out and never use entities (or at gunpoint,
really), and the only people I've heard complaining strongly about their
potential disappearance so far have been the MathML folks. I think it
would be quite useful at this point to have a clear idea of who will
suffer if/when entites go, why, and how that could be addressed.
> At present, there's no apparent activity targeted toward providing an
> alternate entity-definition mechanism.
Well there's Norm's idea in his XML 2.0 blog entry, though I would have
concerns that the number of predefined entities that XML parsers would
have to know about would inflate them to the point that they stop
fitting at all on constrained devices. We already have issues that
justify binary XML in that space, I'd hesitate to add one more (even
though if a binary syntax were to be part of XML 2.0, that concern could
be considered alleviated by the fact that the alternative is there anyway).
--
Robin Berjon
Research Scientist
Expway, http://expway.com/
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