- From: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:34:41 +0000
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 23:57 23/10/96 +0000, Tim Bray wrote: > Where we got to on the ERB was: > >1. external text entities are a basic necessity for authoring (I want to > validate my 700-page book without having to have it in a file) and > they're not even that hard to do [once you've limited the system > identifier repertoire, which we've done]. Arguably, without them, > XML is a delivery-only toy language I would like to point that at least one person on the ERB (me) passionately believes that this viewpoint is totally misguided. If you do large-scale authoring with nothing more than a parser, a simple file-based entity manager, a text editor and the filesystem, then, yes, you would have problems managing without external text entities. If that's what you want to do, author in SGML: you have all the authoring tools you need already. The focus in XML should be on enabling the development of authoring environments, and it is certainly possible to build a fine authoring environment without any use of external text entities. James
Received on Thursday, 24 October 1996 06:40:52 UTC