Re: Optional features considered harmful

At 15:15 24/10/96 -0400, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>>I think you can get 3 and 4 without external text entities by using
>>transclusion via link semantics, which are going to be standardized in a
>>later phase of XML.
>
>Right. Can't we treat external entities as a special case of that
>given the synchronous structure of them?

I think you may be right.

An XML parser intended for Web browsers wouldn't resolve an external text
entity immediately itself but rather would return a transclude event to the
application and keep going.  This would make it hard for a Web browser to do
validation, but that may not be a problem.

It would be easier to make this work if we disallowed references to external
text entities in attribute values, but hopefully people can live without those.

James

Received on Thursday, 24 October 1996 15:51:48 UTC