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• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <SimonStL@c...>
• To: "Xml-Dev (E-mail)" <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Sat, 29 Nov 97 20:34:54 UT

>I don't think I've seen it explicitly suggested here, so here goes.  If you
>want to ensure that what's pointed to is real XML, and "belongs" in that
>location, how about using a plain old external text entity?  With a
>validating XML processor, you can guarantee that (a) the entity will be
>expanded in place before it even gets to the application and that (b) it
>will be validated in context.

Entities are extremely useful, to be sure, but don't offer the flexibility of 
XPointers by a long margin.  The project I'm working on is really a 
feasibility study at this point, and that flexibility is key to this 
particular project.  It could in fact be implemented with entities, but that 
would require creating far more files that we have hoped for, as the data we 
want to reference comes from different and overlapping portions of a small set 
of documents.  Implementing this as entities would require far more 
maintenance whenever a change came down the pike.  

The processing model we'd like to see for EMBED is very similar to that used 
for a text entity, but it doesn't look like we'll be getting there soon.  
Entities and NOTATIONs serve their purposes, but XML-Link seems far more 
flexible, especially for our needs.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer (January) / Cookies (February)




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