those predeclared entity refs

Section 2.4 of the XML-lang draft has text that says that & and <
	must be represented using the strings "&amp;" and "&lt;"
		(sic wrt missing sentence ending punctuation)

Section 4.2 discusses entity declarations in such a fashion that
it does not rule out the possibility of declarations such as:

	<!ENTITY lt "Lieutenant">
	<!ENTITY lessthan "<">

I would think a user wishing to embed a "<" character into this
XML document would be much better served by using &lessthan;, but
per section 2.4, they *must* use &lt; instead.


I know we talked in the WG about whether these predeclared entity
refs could be redeclared or not, but I can't find any such words
in the draft spec (and I can't find any reference to a final
decision on this point).  What seems missing from the spec are 
some words that either say you cannot redefine the five special
entities or words in 2.4 that say you can use different refs
to get < and &.

Personally, I'd prefer to be able to redeclare the predeclared
entities, but I could live with not being able to do this is
that's the decision that's been made.  Then we need to say 
something like "the pre-declaration of those 5 entities effectively
occur before any of the markup declarations are processed so that
any attempted explicit declaration of them would be superceded
by the pre-declaration and would therefore have no effect."

What was the decision on this and am I right that the spec needs
clarification in this area?

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 1997 18:10:22 UTC