Re: Optional features considered harmful

At 23:57 23/10/96 +0000, Tim Bray wrote:
> Where we got to on the ERB was:
>
>1. external text entities are a basic necessity for authoring (I want to
>   validate my 700-page book without having to have it in a file) and 
>   they're not even that hard to do [once you've limited the system 
>   identifier repertoire, which we've done].  Arguably, without them,
>   XML is a delivery-only toy language

I would like to point that at least one person on the ERB (me) passionately
believes that this viewpoint is totally misguided. If you do large-scale
authoring with nothing more than a parser, a simple file-based entity
manager, a text editor and the filesystem, then, yes, you would have
problems managing without external text entities.  If that's what you want
to do, author in SGML: you have all the authoring tools you need already.
The focus in XML should be on enabling the development of authoring
environments, and it is certainly possible to build a fine authoring
environment without any use of external text entities.

James