Re: writing entity references.

No, you're not missing anything obvious.

It wouldn't be sufficient just to support writing out entity
references.  Referencing an undeclared entity is a well-formedness
violation, which will get a fatal error from any conforming XML
processor.  To support this, XSL would also either need to add ways to
declare entities or ways to add references to external DTDs.  This would
be a real can of worms.

I would say it was an abuse of XML to attach semantic significance to
the entity names. The semantic of referencing the entity should be
identical to referencing the equivalent Unicode character. If you use
XT, it will write it out in UTF-8, rather than as a character
reference.  With an appropriate font, you should be able to see the
right glyphs, so readability needn't be lost.

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
> Using the current draft, is it possible to write out entity references?
> I am using the latest xt and trying to use the transformation part of
> xsl to write out MathML.
> 
> If my template has
>  <mo>&InvisibleApply;</mo>
> I get the following error from xt (as I would expect)
>           reference to undefined entity "InvisibleApply"
> 
> However if I try anything such as  <mo>&amp;InvisibleApply;</mo>
> or various incantations with <![CDATA[ then I get no error, but instead
> get
> 
> &amp;InvisibleApply;
> 
> written to the output, which is not what I want either.
> 
> I could make the entity known to xt with its definition as in the MathML
> recommendation, which is a character entity pointing at some slot in the
> unicode private area, but (unfortunately?) some MathML processors are
> really expecting to see the entity name explictly rather than the
> equivalent unicode character. In anycase using the names keeps the
> generated MathML being more or less humanly readable.
> 
> I feel that I am missing something obvious....


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