Re: Optional features considered harmful

At 06:54 24/10/96 +0000, Tim Bray wrote:
>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 think you can get 3 and 4 without external text entities by using
transclusion via link semantics, which are going to be standardized in a
later phase of XML.

James