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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: external parsed entites (was: A unique ID question ?)
 At 99/11/10 23:27 -0600, Len Bullard wrote: >G. Ken Holman wrote: > > I need them when I need to handle *one* XML file in *many* small manageable > > pieces ... I don't need them for re-use or for sharing, but they provide a > > useful convenience. > >Cost questions: does the feature > >1. Add cost to implementation? I haven't written an XML processor, so I can't comment on that. >2. Add complexity to information handling No, it simplifies the handling of my information by allowing me to handle a large file in small chunks. My XSLT/XPath book is written in XML. For downstream processing of the PDF it needs to be one large contiguous instance. For editing, I have every individual lesson (each between one and 10 frames in length) in individual external parsed entities. The entirety is over 300 printed pages ... I don't want to pull all of that into my editor to work on a single lesson. >is the >convenience worth the overhead? The convenience is worth a lot to me. >Yes, >they are good for managing small chunks of big >documents and easy to assemble with tools if one >is careful in building the entities, True, but they do enforce correct logical boundaries within physical containers, so I see that not a lot of care is needed ... I think they are pretty easy to use. >and knows how one is >going to use them with other chunks. Ahhhhhh! But I don't use them that way. They aren't designed for reuse. When I want one of my presentations to use a lesson from another presentation, I address that lesson by name and refer to the presentation by URI and my assembly process goes and fetches the lesson out of that other completely parsed instance at production time. I'm fetching the logical construct within the other complete file. This way the physical boundaries of files in the lessons are immaterial (thus, they cannot interfere). I do *not* use external parsed entities for an information sharing scheme ... I use any one external parsed entity as a convenience in only one instance and don't "use them with other chunks". It is this convenience and functionality that I don't want to disappear. Yes, I can understand those who don't want to give users enough rope to hang themselves, but I don't think we can legislate all barriers to abuse. Certainly it behooves us who work with this technology to preach that external parsed entities are unacceptable for fragment reuse (thank you, Eliot, for doing so publicly), but if people won't listen, is that the design's fault? Does the feature *have* to disappear? ............... Ken -- G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@C... Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/x/ Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0 +1(613)489-0999 (Fax:-0995) Web site: XSL/XML/DSSSL/SGML services, training, libraries, products. Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath ISBN 1-894049-02-0 Next instructor-led training: 1999-12-05/06, 1999-12-07, - 2000-02-27/28, 2000-05-11/12, 2000-05-15 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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