Re: Parameter entity references in WF docs

At 09:19 1997 05 28 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>I'm now putting PE reference handling in Lark, and it's turning into
>quite a lot of code - since these things are just for DTD's, and Lark
>is nonvalidating anyhow, I'm wondering if the extra processing and code
>size required are in the spirit of XML, particularly for lightweight
>standalone processing.  It seems like PE's are largely in the spec to
>support authoring-end activities.
>
>Would it be reasonable to think about saying either that
>(a) PErefs should not be used in the internal DTD subset, or
>(b) PErefs should not be used in WF docs?

I, for one, am getting the uneasy feeling that XML is starting to
suffer from "over-indulging":  it's putting on too much weight.

Of course, everyone wants it to be powerful enough to solve his/her
problem, but then it risks being too big to be the ubiquitous solution
we want it to be.  (I had the same feeling with various SGML Open
technical resolutions:  I started out thinking something simple would
give us a good cost/benefit ratio, and then features kept getting added
until I feared we were reducing the chance of having it widely implemented.)

I say this not from an implementor's point of view, but as one who just
wants XML to succeed:  SGML and HyTime "do it all" but get stuck in a
small niche, and HTML grabs at a very small part of the problem, but
pulls in a huge market.  I'm beginning to lean (even more so that I
may have at first) toward trimming what we can.  Though I reserve the
right to be convinced otherwise, I would currently support ideas to
simplify XML by restricting the use of PErefs.

paul

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 1997 14:06:26 UTC