Re: [xml-dev] misprocessing namespaces (was Re: [xml-dev] There is a meaning, but it's not in the data alone)

At 8:49 PM -0800 2/3/02, Tim Bray wrote:


>But general parsed entities... yecch.  Doing content aggregation
>at the lexical level feels  wrong.  They cause all sorts of
>baroque complexity in APIs.  Non-validating parsers don't read
>them.  They cause all sorts of complexity for ID/IDREF management,
>and they complicate namespace processing horribly.  They are
>totally aimed at document/publishing applications of XML, and
>in my experience, they don't work that well there.  Eliot Kimber
>was telling us 8 years ago that they were basically broken and
>we weren't smart enough to realise he was right.
>

But they're a really sweet syntax sugar when I can't remember the 
exact keys to hit to get a curly quote, an em dash or an e with 
accent acute. Can you imagine trying to sell XHTML to designers 
without   and ©?

The problems seem to lie beyond this, when larger parts of the 
document are pulled in. The difference between external and internal 
parsed entities may be relevant. I must admit I can't think of many 
cases where I've seen external parsed entities used outside of 
textbook examples.

Not that any of this can be fixed now. :-(
-- 

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| Elliotte Rusty Harold |  | Writer/Programmer |
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