docbook-tc — archive

Re: [docbook-tc] Proposal: stop shipping entity sets with DocBook V4.4

From: Michael Smith
To: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 10:30:00 -0000

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Subject: Re: [docbook-tc] Proposal: stop shipping entity sets with DocBook V4.4

From: Michael Smith <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 19:30:11 +0900

Bob Stayton <[email protected]> writes:

> I think removing the entities entirely from the distribution and then
> forcing people to hunt them down and integrate them is a step backwards for
> DocBook.

[...]

I understand what you're saying, but I personally believe it's a
positive step forward if you think about about where DocBook is headed.

What I mean is, the ISO entities were never an essential part of DocBook
to begin with. They were included in the distro and in the DTD as a
convenience for users. At the time when we didn't have editing
applications that supported Unicode, it made some sense to include them.
But I think it makes a lot less sense to do so now.

Along with that, there's the fact that the TC has agreed (I think) to
eventually move to RELAX NG as the normative schema language for
DocBook. One of the first things that users are going to find if/when
they move to doing their authoring and validation using tools that
support RELAX NG is that they probably don't want to continue using
named character entities. Doing so will require including an internal
DTD subset in each and every one of their doc instances, which sort of
defeats the purpose of using RELAX NG to begin with.

  --Mike

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