- From: <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 18:56:52 -0400
- To: abrahams@acm.org
- cc: David Carlisle <david@dcarlisle.demon.co.uk>, abrahams@acm.org, XML-uri@w3.org
>> I believe that this mechanism was first suggested by Henry Thompson >> and used in the dtd for schema. I got it from the HTML WG. >Do you think it's sufficiently nonobvious to deserve mention in some >non-normative place? (I do.) I think it's sufficiently nonobvious that I'm tempted to say it should quickly be swept back under the rug. Parameter entities are a _disaster_ from the point of view of trying to develop a data model for the DTD; they're almost impossible to do a reasonably intelligent read-edit-write cycle on without reparsing after each edit. They're really an embedded preprocessing stage -- and are thus both as seductive for the user and as annoying for the maintainer as previous preprocessors (cpp, m4, etc). I've used this trick. I hold my nose every time I do so. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 18:57:39 UTC