Entity references

The example fragment in B.2 is not well-formed XML: in the p:body
element there is an reference to an entity author that has not been
defined.  Any conforming XML processor will give a fatal error on the
fragment.  This seems like a flaw in the design: you surely can't be
proposing that a packaging mechanism relies on illegal XML.

The possible solutions that occur to me are:

(a) Expand the entity references. This is fine if you're just displaying
the document; not so good if you're editing it.

(b) Elementize the entity references.  By this I mean, within the
package body turn &author; into <p:entity-ref name="author"/>.  To make
this work for entity references in attribute values, you would have to
elementize attributes as well, by for example, turning

  <foo att="&e;">data</foo>

into

  <foo><p:attribute name="att"><p:entity-ref
name="e"/></p:attribute>data</foo>

(c) Add to the fragment an internal subset that includes the appropriate
entity declarations.

James

Received on Sunday, 7 March 1999 23:01:11 UTC