external parameter entities

• From: Richard Goerwitz <Richard_Goerwitz@Brown.EDU>
• Date: Wed, 01 Jul 1998 18:36:56 -0400
• To: xml-editor@w3.org
• Message-ID: <359ABA08.CC539A8D@Brown.EDU>

Internal parameter entity replacement text, as given in a decl, is
valid by definition, according to the XML standard.  External parameter
entity replacement text must parse according to the extSubsetDecl pro-
duction according to the standard.

This would seem to make it illegal to do some seemingly very natural
things like:

  <!ENTITY % e SYSTEM "external.data">

where external.data contains a token like "EMPTY" or "CDATA".

Is this what you intended?  E.g., if I want to define a parameter entity
to be "IGNORE", is it impossible to dump the word "IGNORE" into a data
file, and point an entity declaration at it?

James Clark's XML validation suite uses constructs like the above.

Am I right to be confused here?

-- 

Richard Goerwitz
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Received on Wednesday, 1 July 1998 18:40:11 UTC