[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: misprocessing namespaces (was Re: There is a
I agree with Tim. Although, I'm no fan of parameter entities either. General parsed entities are a poor man's document database tool for boilerplate, but not much more, IMO. len -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...] At 12:01 AM 03/02/02 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: *If* there's ever an XML 2 - and that's a long shot - one of >>the #1 requirements would be nuke entities, I think. -Tim > >I must say I'm surprised to hear that, especially coming from you. Just for curiosity's sake, would you mind elaborating on your reasoning? Personally, I've often thought unparsed entities were on the wrong side of the 90/10 divide, but parsed entities seem quite useful. Actually, I have no trouble with unparsed entities, except the web seems to get by just fine without the extra level of indirection they buy you. I also have no big problem with parameter entities, they stay off in the DTD where ordinary people and run-time code don't have to deal with them. But general parsed entities... yecch. Doing content aggregation at the lexical level feels wrong. They cause all sorts of baroque complexity in APIs. Non-validating parsers don't read them. They cause all sorts of complexity for ID/IDREF management, and they complicate namespace processing horribly. They are totally aimed at document/publishing applications of XML, and in my experience, they don't work that well there. Eliot Kimber was telling us 8 years ago that they were basically broken and we weren't smart enough to realise he was right. I think xml:include is probably a better stab at a solution to the problem, but I also think we don't have enough experience to know how big/important the inclusion problem is, and what the right answer to it is. -Tim
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