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Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View

• To: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• From: Ann Navarro <ann@w...>
• Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:48:11 -0500
• Cc: tbray@t... (Tim Bray),davidc@n... (David Carlisle),jcowan@r...,xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200211012249.RAA18232@m...>
• References: <4.3.2.7.2.20021101170300.028b5370@m...>

At 05:35 PM 11/1/2002 -0500, John Cowan wrote:

> > Asking document authors to write DTDs to simply use the trademark symbol
> > (or insert your common character of choice), something they've done for
> > years, strikes me as the result of laziness on our part (we = the creators
> > of standards). They shouldn't have to do that. Any reasonable 
> justification
> > escapes me.
>
>The alternative is having gobs of character entities built into every XML
>parser.  They are built into every HTML parser, true, but XML parsers have
>a lot wider domain of application, and often need to be more lightweight.

I've never claimed to be a parser developer, but I don't believe that 
they'd have to be built into the parser itself. As it stands now, entities 
can be defined in DTDs, parsers certainly must know what to do with them, 
but the definition itself surely isn't universally hardwired. You can't 
define entities in XML Schema (except by using a DTD, which doesn't count, 
IMO). Let's fix that, and it would work just as entities defined in DTDs 
would. Problem solved for XHTML, and any other language development effort.

Ann


-----
Ann Navarro, WebGeek, Inc.
http://www.webgeek.com

say what? http://www.snorf.net/blog

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