Re: [xml-dev] Parsing without resolving entities

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> Can anyone address the Why 

History mainly, but one rationale is that entities are an _authoring
convenience_ It's essentially a macro pre-processing layer. So as an
author you want the assurance that you can bundle up any part of the XML
document that you want into an entity and refer to it one or more times,
if you find that convenient and all subsequent XML applications will
treat the document the same way, no matter what authoring shortcuts you
used. Essentially because they never see the entity references as they
are expanded first during the initial parse.

That's the theory, the practice is that an author has hundreds of
carefully crafted entities, makes a small XSLT transformation to change
one element, and is upset to find that all references have been expanded...
Which is why most people end up "hiding" the entity references at some
point or other....


david

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