Re: [xml-dev] ten years later, time to repeat it?

[Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@Sun.COM>]

On Feb 18, 2008, at 12:27 PM, Jim Melton wrote:

> Maybe I and my fellow editors of W3C and ISO specs are 'way out of  
> the norm, but we use the internal DTD subset very extensively.  In  
> fairness, I admit that we use it (almost?) exclusively for ENTITY  
> declarations.

ENTITY declarations are reasonably sane in the publishing-technology  
context (although less useful in practice than the theory of SGML  
held), and XML was invented by by a bunch of publishing-tech geeks.   
In the world of wire protocols, Entities are actively pernious; among  
other things, they open the door to the billion-laughs attack.  You  
really don't want a general-purpose recursive macro processor running  
over high-volume protocol traffic.

-Tim