Re: questions about entities and entity declarations

On Wed, 25 Sep 96 21:11:03 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:

>> The ISO character entity *sets* are external entities, but the entity
>> declarations within them declare *internal* SDATA entities. They would
>> have to be redeclared as you say if we are to exclude internal SDATA
>> entities.
>
>I am probably being obtuse here, but how would I refer to (for example)
>a symbol that has no Unicode or ISO10646 code point?  For example, suppose
>I need an r-cedilla... in SGML I've used SDATA entities for that.
>
>I'd be quite happy with an alternative.
>

 A symbol that is not in the character set would be like any other graphic; use
an external NDATA entity. That gives you an opportunity to declare the notation
explicitly (and data attributes for it), which SDATA doesn't provide.

Remember that SGML has never required a separate file for  external entities.
With Formal System Identifiers, we can now formally specify when we are using
container Storage Managers that let multiple entities occur in the same storage
object  (e.g., TAR, PKZIP, MIME).

If you don't like using external NDATA for this purpose, we could agree to allow
internal SDATA entities in XML. If so, we would probably want a convention, such
as the one proposed for PIs, that would identify the notation for the SDATA
entity.
--
Charles F. Goldfarb * Information Management Consulting * +1(408)867-5553
           13075 Paramount Drive * Saratoga CA 95070 * USA
  International Standards Editor * ISO 8879 SGML * ISO/IEC 10744 HyTime
 Prentice-Hall Series Editor * CFG Series on Open Information Management
--

Received on Thursday, 26 September 1996 04:20:15 UTC