XML Link and External Entities

Could someone please explain why XML-Link cannot reference external
entities? The allowance of PUBLIC seems quite hollow in its absence. It
also seems quite odd that XML-Lang and XML-Link should be "out of sync"
in this respect. If we believe that URLs should go directly in XML
documents, then we should allow URLs as internal entity names:

&http://www.uwaterloo.ca;

so that the mechanism for including text fragments and for referencing
text fragments would be analogous. I don't see why the parser should
(implicitly) retain the SGML concept of an "entity manager" but the link
processor should not.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Thursday, 19 June 1997 09:49:06 UTC