[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XSchema Spec, Sections 2.0 and 2.1 (Draft 1)
>By keeping entities _out_ of XSchema we can: >a) take advantage of one of the things XML currently does reasonably well >b) leave room for all kinds of entity madness in a _future_ standard >c) ensure interoperability with well-formed XML documents >d) make XSchema _much_ less work to implement > >Sound good? Chalk up one vote for this. I just can get over the feeling that including a mechanism for entity declarations in XSchema would be a step in the wrong direction. Okay, this has a lot to do with the fact that I never liked the way entities are managed in the first place. It is extremely confusing to someone learning XML that referencing some external binary data and transcluding external text use the same mechanism. On top of this, an entity reference syntax is simply too terse. They is no way to document or parameterize the use of an entity reference (without resorting to comments), which is why it was necessary to invent XLink in the first place. As far as parameter entities are concerned, I sincerely hope that XSchema will evolve a way to handle content model reuse cleanly in the future. A combination of what is essentially text replacement combined with overloading of entire attribute lists and content model declarations is not going to cut it in the mass market. There seems to be general agreement about this. For other entity types (internal, external parsed and unparsed), using XLink instead of entity references seems to have overwhelming advantages. It is more flexible (e.g. enabling multiple targets), cleaner (e.g. enabling specification of link and content roles) and doesn't require the use of an additional low-level syntactic construct. As far as text transclusion is concerned: isn't this the purpose of the "embed" value for the "show" attribute? It would probably be legitimite to ask what this has to do with XSchema, but this just drives the point home. Text-replacement mechanisms have nothing to do with defining a class of document and certainly nothing to do with defining appropriate mechanism for schema reuse. Both of these issues would be fascinating areas for future discussion; IMO they should be kept separate from the initial XSchema spec. Regards, 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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