At 11:34 AM 24/10/96 +0000, James Clark wrote: >At 23:57 23/10/96 +0000, Tim Bray wrote: >>1. external text entities are a basic necessity for authoring ... >I would like to point that at least one person on the ERB (me) passionately >believes that this viewpoint is totally misguided... >... it is certainly possible to build a fine authoring >environment without any use of external text entities. James is correct; it is certainly possible to do this. But SGML provides a built-in, standard, nonproprietary way to go about it. The way I sell SGML in the corporate world is: SGML gives you: 1. a way to model the structure of your documents, and 2. a way to control the authoring so they come out right, and 3. a way to modularize documents for re-use and management, and 4. ALL OF THIS IS STANDARDIZED AND NON-PROPRIETARY It seems to me that if XML loses text entities, then #4 no longer applies to #3. I don't know - is this a fair price to pay for making XML lightweight and easy to adopt? At the same time, James is correct that it is unreasonable and wrong to expect render-mostly network browsers to use the SGML transclude-and-parse semantics. Is there an option-free way to reconcile our goals? Cheers, Tim Bray tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167Received on Thursday, 24 October 1996 09:58:22 EDT
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