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

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On 13/03/2022 18:21, David Carlisle wrote:
[...]
> "Why" questions are hard to answer, especially when there are people 
> watching who were there and could answer :-)
Not guilty :-)

> But I think that the idea was that processors are allowed to not
> fetch external subsets but are required to process the internal
> subset so the internal subset has a restricted syntax so that such 
> implementations don't need the full w̶e̶i̶r̶d̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ power of full
> DTD processing capability.
Oddly, in SGML, I think you can actually have your concrete syntax 
declarations at the start, in the file, before the internal subset. So 
I'm not really clear why the internal subset would need restricting, but 
possibly the circuitousness of implementing PEs in the internal subset 
was one straw too many.  Moot in XML anyway.

Peter