Re: warnings from Xeena: dagger multipli-defined

> I don't know if you guys are working on a new rev of the dtd's and entities,
> but I thought someone might be interested in the following:
> 2 warning messages issued from IBM's Xeena when processing the 1.01 MathML
> dtd + entities:

Yes, we are (there is a charter to produce a revised MathMl 2 spec early
next year)

I am not sure what is best to do about those warnings. As a matter of
policy in MathML 1.01 the entity files with `ISO' names define complete
ISO entity sets. This is important as unlike element names you can not
use `XML namespaces' or any other mechanism to `localise' entity
declarations. All entity names are in scope for the entire document
instance.

So if MathML is to be embedded into a larger document type for
controlling the rest of the document (xhtml, docbook, Kluwer Journal
DTD, ...) then it can not have `variants' of the ISO declarations
all parts of the document have to be using the same definitions for the
ISO entity names. At present it is necessary for the Math WG to produce
these ISO entity files but one assumes that there will eventually be a
standard set (perhaps by adopting the MathML ones).

It so happens that the names you mention [dD]agger are contained in two
entity sets (isopub and isoamsb) and so if you load both of these sets
then the entity is defined twice. The same definition is used both
times, and even if that were not the case it would not be an XML error
(the second would be ignored) however if applications are going to
trouble users with these warnings a pragmatic solution might be to drop
the symbols from (say) isopub.ent and document somewhere that if a
document type wants to use ISOPub without ISOAMSA then it will need to
additionally define the dagger symbols.

David

Received on Thursday, 28 October 1999 04:32:24 UTC