Re: [xml-dev] Nested entity declarations in DTDs

[Sebastian Pipping <sebastian@pipping.org>]

Hi Daniel and xml-dev,


On 13.03.22 19:43, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> You are going on https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/ right?
more specifically, there is section…

  D Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)
  https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#sec-entexpand

…in there where the evaluation of this XML sample…

  1| <?xml version='1.0'?>
  2| <!DOCTYPE test [
  3| <!ELEMENT test (#PCDATA) >
  4| <!ENTITY % xx '&#37;zz;'>
  5| <!ENTITY % zz '&#60;!ENTITY tricky "error-prone" >' >
  6| %xx;
  7| ]>
  8| <test>This sample shows a &tricky; method.</test>

…is evaluated manually with explanation; given its use of "&#37;" and
the resulting delayed interpretation of the entity declaration, this
seems to be about as close of a match as it gets.

I'm not sure of the consequences of "Non-Normative" in the section
heading.  The way I read the related text is that they explain expected
behavior but also call this method error-prone to warn XML writers of
relying on this feature because of to-be-expected incompatibilities with
some implementations, due to the tricky aspects of these details.

Best



Sebastian