- From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@eps.inso.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 14:43:58 -0700
- To: "Stephen R. Savitzky" <steve@crc.ricoh.com>, <lauren@sqwest.bc.ca>
- Cc: <www-dom@w3.org>
> It is very difficult to implement this any way but by making > actual copies, because each occurrance of the Entity has to > have, or appear to have, the correct parentNode and sibling links. To be more correct, all the direct descendants of an EntityReference have to have the "correct" parent and siblings. Entity only lives in DocumentType. > This brings up a weak point in both the XML and the DOM specs -- no > consideration at all is given to the possibility that one might want to > _output_ a document, in which case replacing each EntityReference with its > corresponding Entity is WRONG. The whole assumption is that the > parser is a front-end for an application that doesn't want to know about the _real_ > structure of the document. This is less true of the DOM. The ability to naively write out a document and get pretty much the right structure has been an important goal.
Received on Tuesday, 28 July 1998 14:44:41 UTC