Re: Optional features considered harmful

On Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:52:21 -0400 James Clark said:
>At 15:15 24/10/96 -0400, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>>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.

Er, I'm sorry if I'm missing something, but doesn't clause 7.9.4.2
(p. 335 of Handbook) restrict ENTITY/ENTITIES attributes to
data and SUBDOC entities?  I.e. isn't your conditional already met?
(I think we reaffirmed that XML will work the same way, on question
C.3 the other day.)

I hope so, because anything that would make this work more easily
while allowing external text entities is a good thing in my book.

-Michael Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Thursday, 24 October 1996 16:30:36 UTC