Re: For literals: why I changed my mind

>> 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