Re: Parameter entities allowed anywhere ?

On Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:56:56 -0500 Norbert H. MIKULA said:
>If I follow production 33 in WD-xml-961114 by the word
>then I am allowed to use PEReference only at the top-level
>of internal-subset.
>
>Do we want this ? And if not, do we put certain
>restrictions on it ?

If this is a correct reading of the grammar, then the document is
wrong.  There was no decision to restrict parameter entities to
a single level of expansion, and the motivation for having p.e.s
at all was to allow the use of current DTD construction methods.


To be honest though I don't think this is a correct reading of
production 33.  There should probably be prose saying that
PE references in the internal and external subsets are invisible
to the grammar (in the sense that the replacement text has to
fit where the reference goes, i.e. that you stay in the internal
subset rule), except that references can only occur where the
grammar say they can.  (Except that that is also false; the
grammar makes no pretense of saying where PE refs can occur
within declarations.  Perhaps it's the limitations of my technical
training, but I have not found a clean way to describe the PE
rules formally, and not much of a clean way to describe them
informally, either.  Any help from the assembled wise ones would
be very useful.

Thank you for calling attention to this problem.  -CMSMcQ

Received on Wednesday, 26 February 1997 07:45:22 UTC