• From: Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@S...>
• To: Jim Melton <jim.melton@a...>
• Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:31:24 -0800

On Feb 18, 2008, at 12:27 PM, Jim Melton wrote:

> Maybe I and my fellow editors of W3C and ISO specs are 'way out of  
> the norm, but we use the internal DTD subset very extensively.  In  
> fairness, I admit that we use it (almost?) exclusively for ENTITY  
> declarations.

ENTITY declarations are reasonably sane in the publishing-technology  
context (although less useful in practice than the theory of SGML  
held), and XML was invented by by a bunch of publishing-tech geeks.   
In the world of wire protocols, Entities are actively pernious; among  
other things, they open the door to the billion-laughs attack.  You  
really don't want a general-purpose recursive macro processor running  
over high-volume protocol traffic.

-Tim

• References:
  • RE: ten years later, time to repeat it?
    • From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>
  • Re: ten years later, time to repeat it?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: ten years later, time to repeat it?
    • From: Jim Melton <jim.melton@a...>