Re: examples don't show that entities are deprecated from David Carlisle on 2000-04-26 (www-math@w3.org from April 2000)

From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 16:51:48 +0100 (BST)
To: hammond@csc.albany.edu
CC: www-math@w3.org, connolly@w3.org
Message-Id: <200004261551.QAA19882@nag.co.uk>

> 
> I wonder what is the reason for deprecating "&pi;" and friends.
> Surely, not concern about parser over-heating ( :-\ ).  And then
> what is the difference?

entity references mean that Mathml fragments  are almost always not
well formed XML: you have to have a <!DOCTYPE that includes a DTD that
declares all the entities. This was always a concern, and is about to
become a major problem as XML schema languages typically replace most
of the functionality of DTDs but do not provide a mechanism for declaring
entities (there would be no way for them to do so without changing XML)

So entity references are deprecated and instead you can use character
data directly, or character references &#x123; or the new mathml2
feature, <mchar  name"=...."/>

As Dan  correctly observes though, several of the examples need 
updating to use mchar rather than &. This is on our list of known things
to fix.

David

Received on Wednesday, 26 April 2000 11:53:04 UTC