- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 10:20:19 -0800
- To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Elliote's examples reproduced below tend to reinforce my opinion that entities are in general on the wrong side of the cost-benefit curve. Yes, these are nice-to-haves. No, I don't think removing entities from XML would get in the way enough to be a real roadblock. -Tim Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > Imagine an SVG based picture of the Mandelbrot set (or hell, it doesn't > have to be fractal, any sufficiently deep algorithmically generated > picture would do) in which different levels were connected by entity > references. > > Or imagine a system in which successive time increments were children of > the previous instance rather than siblings. > > Or imagine an XML-based object oriented language (there are several) > which allowed nested classes or methods. A code generating tool might > easily put far more classes inside each other, and far deeper than any > human programmer would. (Auto-generated code from tools like YACC is > notorious for exposing compiler bugs caused by arbitrary limits and > assumptions about what code looks like). Again if each separate nested > class is a separate file connected by an entity reference, there's a > problem. > > Think of things that are deep and recursive but don't explode > exponentially. We don't want to forbid those.
Received on Friday, 6 December 2002 13:20:21 UTC