At 03:10 PM 07/10/96 +0000, James Clark wrote: >I am only going to address entities in the document instance in this note. I am in agreement with most of James' points. The one where (at the moment) I part company is best exemplified by a particular piece of text that Michael and I are working with heavily these days - namely the outline of the XML spec. In the middle, one fines the following: <BODY> &Intro; &Docs; &Elements; &Entities; .... It's tough to imagine how we could do collaborative authoring in Vancouver and Chicago without this kind of facility, which certainly doesn't require the application of an OO database, etc.; and this is quite a non-trivial task. Or am I missing something? BTW, James is totally right that supporting external text entities does increase the plumbing complexity in the parser - the one time I did this it seemed not to break the grad-could-do-it-in-a-week barrier, but it is outside the scope of the 5-line perl hack job. I'm not sure I believe that "the parser has to call into the call back into the application to get the contents of declared entities" - when I did it, all that was done down in the lexer (yes, the lexer had to see the dsd) - which made available to the parser (and app) a picture of the entity tree - if they wanted it. His points about the difficulty of selling this to HTML-heads who are used to just jamming in a URL are good too; arguably though, the transclude & parse semantic is one that is not currently available in HTML - so they're going to have to learn something new anyhow... and we'll certainly support the kind of transclude & process a la the HTML <IMG tag. Cheers, Tim Bray tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167Received on Monday, 7 October 1996 13:50:34 EDT
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