Re: XML-* [was: ... XML subsetting...]

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