On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 15:00 -0600, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
[...]
> I couldn't even support such an idea in principle. For me, one of the
> cornerstones of XML's value is in completely determining the lexical space.
> I think leaving entity interpretation to applications would kick a huge
> hole in that.
Since an application can substitute an alternate DTD by mapping the
public or system identifier, this is the status quo today.
So perhaps this is a matter of degree. For one thing, if an app does that, each entity will at least be consistently (mis)interpreted throughout the parse of the document, and this (mis)interpretation is still technically in the lexical domain.
If each entity were reported to the application for interpretation, you could have the app assign the same entity a completely different value at different points in the document, which is to me what makes it feel like a crossing of the line.
