Re: Entity Expansion

"David A. Lee" <dlee@calldei.com> writes:

> Where does it say in the specs that ENTITY elements are expanded in steps ?
> I looked for the word ENTITY and ENTITIES in the specs and the only
> reference was in the http-request step.

(Where it doesn't mean ENTITY in the same sense as the XML Recommendation. :-)

Whether or not entities are expanded is one of the few optional
features in the XML Recommendation. Appendix A.3 of the XProc spec
lists the required information items. If your implementation also
supports other information items, like entity reference information
items, then I don't think we can call your implementation
non-conforming.

Still, it's probably worth saying that we don't expect them. I took a
quick glance through the XSLT and XPath specs, which have the
same constraints, and it wasn't immediately clear to me how they are
expressed there.

> If its not explicit then an otherwise conforming implementation could
> fail this test.    Or for example, adding a p:identity earlier in the
> pipeline would cause the test to fail, which on the surface atleast
> seems non-obvious.

How would that cause the test to fail?

> I could even imagine cases where it would be useful to programatically
> specify entity expansion on a step by step basis ... although thats
> more on the lines of a 'feature request' then a 'spec clarification'

Most specs that operate on infosets these days expect entities to be
expanded. I'm not sure there's any practical way to "fix" that.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | All our foes are mortal.--Paul Valéry
http://nwalsh.com/            |