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Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?

• To: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>
• Subject: Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 22:07:36 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <20050204204803.GA31024@t...>
• References: <6.0.0.22.0.20050204222038.02251d70@p...> <20050204204803.GA31024@t...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Macintosh/20041206)

Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 10:20:42PM +0200, Toni Uusitalo wrote:
>>I guess that's inevitable progress to go and dump the DTDs.
>>There must be some research going on that measures when people are
>>ready to switch to the alternatives, I've no clue about this thing myself 
>>(about usage numbers of DTDs or RelaxNG etc.).
> 
> For a number of application areas (especially "document" related areas, as
> opposed to "data," for whatever that distinction is worth), there is
> currently no way to move away from DTDs, because entities cannot be defined
> except in DTDs (that's general parsed entities, not parameter entities or
> unparsed entities, which have narrower usage/appeal).

I do documents day-in day-out and never use entities (or at gunpoint, 
really), and the only people I've heard complaining strongly about their 
potential disappearance so far have been the MathML folks. I think it 
would be quite useful at this point to have a clear idea of who will 
suffer if/when entites go, why, and how that could be addressed.

> At present, there's no apparent activity targeted toward providing an
> alternate entity-definition mechanism.

Well there's Norm's idea in his XML 2.0 blog entry, though I would have 
concerns that the number of predefined entities that XML parsers would 
have to know about would inflate them to the point that they stop 
fitting at all on constrained devices. We already have issues that 
justify binary XML in that space, I'd hesitate to add one more (even 
though if a binary syntax were to be part of XML 2.0, that concern could 
be considered alleviated by the fact that the alternative is there anyway).

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

• References:
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Toni Uusitalo <toni.uusitalo@p...>
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>

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