[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
11/3/2002 12:26:57 AM, "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...> wrote: >Why should a user have to distinguish between "what elements can I use?" >and "what standard entities can I use?". In my worldview -- which admittedly is not XML 1.x's -- elements are first class "objects" in "XML" (along with attributes and text, and not much else). Every thing is is just syntax -- entities, CDATA sections, comments [not sure about PIs ..], namespace declarations and prefixes [just a funny syntax for creating unique names]. XML 1.x is merely a widely adopted and semi-standardized syntax for serializing these labeled, attributed tree thingies. I think lots of other syntaxes that are more compressed/encrypted, or more user-friendly, or legacy/proprietary, or more theoretically understood (LISP comes to mind) will also be widely used to exchange these data model thingies across systems and applications and time. Thus, I think of "what elements can I use" as a question about first class objects in the data model , and "what standard entities can I use" as a question about the syntax of one particular serialization technique. If we are talking only about users of XML 1.x syntax, I guess one could rationally argue that there's no reason to distinguish questions about element markup from entity markup, but it seems to make pragmatic sense to distinguish concepts that are universally understood from those that are not used by many XML specs (e.g., the W3C Infoset, in the case of character entities). I realize that many/most of you disagree with this worldview, but I think that it's fairly common, e.g. in the SOAP and XPath/XSLT/ XQuery worlds. I suggest that people who accept the contrary "the only foundation is the XML 1.x syntax" worldview should be somewhat careful not to assume that concepts that have no representation in the W3C infoset (much less my hyper-minimalist data model!) are universally understood.
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