[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSchema Question 6: Entities
>Question: Should entity support be provided in XSchema? > >The goals do not require entity support. During the goals process, a number >of people suggested staying out of the entity business, though a few also >thought it was important. Both Ron and John have included entity support in >their DTD's. This essentially boils down to a philosophical question: is XSchema mainly a new XML-based syntax for working with DTDs or is it the start of a new paradigm for working with XML. My strong preference would be for the latter, including jettisoning baggage from SGML which was included in the XML spec for compatibility reasons but which does not necessarily make sense for new XML applications. Seen in this light, I don't see any reason to include entities in XSchema. Entities are really too powerful and including them as a native construct in the schema makes a lot of infrastructure projects far more complicated (SAX, DOM, etc., etc.). Part of the paradigm shift that I am hoping will take place is a move away from entities and towards more structured linking mechanisms (i.e. XLink and XPointer). This presupposes a certain number of things that most of us seem to take for granted anyway, such as the fact that graphical authoring environments will replace hand-coding of XML for most non-trivial tasks. To this I would add mixing-and-matching of schemas; entities are abused far too much because of this current lack. The prospect of having an XML-based syntax that takes over the roll of the DTD for defining schema information is very exciting because the prospects for exploiting the synergies rising from this are enormous. It becomes even more so if: 1) Parameter entities become reusable schema fragments (I hacked together an example of this using XLink in a previous post), 2) General entities become XLinks, reducing the free-for-all flavor of XML and enforcing structure. 3) Character entities become transparent to the author and consumer. BTW: I feel the same way about notations. Why not leave them out in favor of a real typing system to be added to the XSchema core sometime in the future? Specifying some basis atomic types, a mechanism for defining structured types (preferably based on reuse of schema fragments) and a tie-in to MIME types surely wouldn't be a project of any more complexity that the basis XSchema specification. Matthew xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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