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Re: misprocessing namespaces (was Re: There is a

• To: "The Deviants" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: misprocessing namespaces (was Re: There is a meaning, but it's not in the data alone)
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 15:19:38 -0500
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.2.20020203204729.024ed7c0@p...>
• References: <5.1.0.14.2.20020131082226.02822ec0@p...><4XOKTPSQ3W1VLJ9607AZVUSBAUOYX05.3c586905@MChamp><093701c1a9f2$71c37820$0a2e249b@n...> <3C589A61.95139DF@p...><5.1.0.14.2.20020131082226.02822ec0@p...><5.1.0.14.2.20020203204729.024ed7c0@p...>

At 8:49 PM -0800 2/3/02, Tim Bray wrote:


>But general parsed entities... yecch.  Doing content aggregation
>at the lexical level feels  wrong.  They cause all sorts of
>baroque complexity in APIs.  Non-validating parsers don't read
>them.  They cause all sorts of complexity for ID/IDREF management,
>and they complicate namespace processing horribly.  They are
>totally aimed at document/publishing applications of XML, and
>in my experience, they don't work that well there.  Eliot Kimber
>was telling us 8 years ago that they were basically broken and
>we weren't smart enough to realise he was right.
>

But they're a really sweet syntax sugar when I can't remember the 
exact keys to hit to get a curly quote, an em dash or an e with 
accent acute. Can you imagine trying to sell XHTML to designers 
without   and ©?

The problems seem to lie beyond this, when larger parts of the 
document are pulled in. The difference between external and internal 
parsed entities may be relevant. I must admit I can't think of many 
cases where I've seen external parsed entities used outside of 
textbook examples.

Not that any of this can be fixed now. :-(
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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