Re: Entities and Entity References

Joseph Kesselman wrote:

> I think the intent was:
> 
> If you loaded the Doctype, its Entity nodes would be created. Period. I
> can't see any reason NOT to load that info if you're able to do so...?


Two reasons:

1) I fail to imagine a use case where one cares about the entities when 
she/he doesn't care about the entity references.

2) Having the entities can be very expensive. Think about a document 
where ever chapter is hold in its own entity. You end up with twice as 
much memory used. That's ok if you care about the entities and their 
refs but a real shame if you don't.

I don't think there is much value in trying to interpret/second guess 
what is expected to be found in a DOM tree after parsing based on the 
DOM Level 1 spec. The DOM Level 1 doesn't include any parsing capability 
and therefore anything related to parsing is undefined.
-- 
Arnaud  Le Hors - IBM, XML Standards Strategy Group / W3C AC Rep.

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2002 12:24:29 UTC