Re: ERB decision, 31 October 1996

At 06:23 PM 10/31/96 -0500, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>>We discussed the issue of external text entities and agreed
>>unanimously to rescind the decision of 23 October on question A.17
>>making support for external text entities an optional feature of XML.
>
>The notion that you *cannot* validate in a lazy-parsing model is
>incorrect. It is a different model, yes, but not impossible (you'd
>have to delay validation of certain nodes until a certain portion of
>an entity had been resolved)

Right.  And we didn't rule that out.  We just said that you don't *have to*
read external text entities unless you're validating.  Which, as you
suggest, a downstream browser likely isn't.  As for nuking external
text entities altogether, we thought that over seriously; there are just
too many people who see them as a sine qua non of a worthwhile authoring
system.

Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167