What happened to textEntity?

I saw the message below in the XML Schema comments list (www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
from October to December 1999 -
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/1999OctDec/subject.html)
and I'd very much like to learn what is the answer to his question.  In the material
that I have seen so far, it seems to me that:

1 - A document instance can be associated with a schema without any use of a DTD.

2 - There is no mechanism within a schema for declaring an entity.

So, it seems to me that in order to declare an entity for use in a document,
a DTD must be employed.  Am I correct in this?

Thanks very much.  Dave Evans, Sirius Software, Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA
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From: "George T. Joseph" <gtj@peakin.com>
To: www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:33:28 -0500
Message-ID: <NDBBIMBOGLCHMCOGIHGMCEPECAAA.gtj@peakin.com>
Subject: What happened to textEntity?

It makes sense that XPointer could replace externalEntity but what takes
the place of the simple constant definition functionality that
textEntity provided?  Up until Friday I was defining an "!ENTITY" in the
internal DTD subset of the schema for use by the schema itself, and in
the body of the schema, a textEntity with the same value for use by
instance document authors.

Is there another mechanism that I'm missing?  The only thing I can think
of off-hand is that I'd have to provide both a DTD and a schema and a
validating parser would have to bounce the instance document against
them both.

George

-----------------------------------------
Example Schema:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE schema PUBLIC "-//W3C/DTD XML Schema Version 1.0//EN"
"<http://www.w3.org/XML/Group/1999/09/23-xmlschema/structures/structures.dtd>"
[
<!ENTITY DEFAULT_VALUE '-4'>
]>
<schema ...>
<textEntity name='DEFAULT_VALUE'>&DEFAULT_VALUE;</textEntity>
...
</schema>

Example XML instance fragment:

<some-element>&DEFAULT_VALUE;</some-element>
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Received on Monday, 24 September 2001 13:33:18 UTC