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RE: Reserved names and documentation

• From: Jarle Stabell <jarle.stabell@d...>
• To: "'xml-dev@i...'" <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 16:08:02 +0100

Simon St.Laurent wrote (about entities and XLink overlap):

> The overlap may not feel dangerous, but the very existence of an overlap
> does make people wonder - a lot.  Having multiple ways to achieve similar
> goals using totally different syntax is usually not considered elegant.
> Elegance may not be a design goal for XML, but it certainly would help on
> the coherence issue.

Personally I'd love to see entities disappear (except the "magic"/necessary 
ones), they make parsers harder to write (especially if one wants to make 
user-friendly tools (on syntax errors, the problematic text should be 
highlighted)). They also (AFAIK) ruin the "Desperate Perl Hacker" idea.

I don't know how many parsers out there are able to do the following (via 
an application):

1. Load a document (with entities)
2. Operate on the document (via DOM).
3. Save it.

*AND* keep the original entity structure intact?

If one removed the entities and used DTD's with XML syntax, I think 
authoring tools would be much easier to implement, and probably easier to 
do the layering needed(?) for more conceptually advanced issues.


Cheers,
Jarle Stabell


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