Re: external entities: in LANG or LINK?

In message <m0wZexJ-0009X5C@sqailor.sqwest.bc.ca> lauren@sqwest.bc.ca (Lauren Wood) writes:
> There's been some discussion about getting rid of external entities in 
> XML LANG. The main reason seems to be that the XML LINK
> solution seems to be better in some ways.

I hope my posting (SHOW="EMBED") didn't give this impression, because it wasn't
meant to :-).  There are many cases where I can see external entities being 
useful.  The purpose of the posting was to ask 'IF someone uses this mechanism,
what are the syntactic, structural and other consequences, 'cos XML-LINK is
not very explicit'

> I think we should keep them in XML LANG. 

Agreed.
 
> 1) They're easy to understand in the XML LANG form
> 2) SGML tools already implement them, so fulfilling 
> guideline 3
> 3) The only required part of XML is XML LANG. XML LINK
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I agree, and this should be constantly re-emphasised.

> is optional. Thus, any feature that goes from being required
> in XML LANG is, in effect, made completely optional. If it
> was important enough to put into XML LANG in the first place,
> why make it optional now?

4) they are easier to understand and implement than the XML-LINK/EMBED approach.

	P.
-- 
Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection
Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/

Received on Thursday, 5 June 1997 15:42:03 UTC