Entity References (was Re: The XSL-List Digest V1 #266)

(Apologies for not changing the subject line earlier...)

>If the parser does keep a node for an entity reference and make the
>replacement text a child of this. Does that mean every application has
>to take account of this explicitly?

If you want to be completely general about operating on any DOM, you have
to allow for the fact that some XML sources (parsers or whatever) will
retain the EntityReference node this way. It's up to you to decide whether
to deal with that in the main-line application code, do a pre-pass through
the document to flatten these references, or insist that whoever handed you
the document have flattened it before you see it.

The XML spec leans heavily in the direction of Entity References being
resolved and flattened as the document is read in, which is fine for
browsers but may not be acceptable for earlier stages of processing.

I've called this issue to the attention of one of the Infoset
representatives, and asked that they consider the issue of preserving
entity references during data processing versus removing them during
rendering. So far the universal agreement is that I've knocked over a
kettle of worms (mixed metaphor intentional) but that it's probably a valid
question.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author.



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