I think external entities could have been much more effective if done
differently:

"If the document contains an entity reference &param; then the application
invoking the parser must provide a value for param, using a parser-defined
API".

Requiring them to be defined in a syntactically-complex DTD file is just too
inflexible to be worth the candle.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

> On 26 Feb 2019, at 20:10, Peter Flynn peter@xxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 26/02/2019 19:50, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> For the record, retaining external and internal text entities in XML was a
mistake. It's something I fought for at the time and now
>> regret every time it comes up.
>
> I would venture to disagree now, as I disagreed then, and for the
> same reasons.
>
>> The XML community has been wise in forgetting that text entities were ever
a feature.
>
> Fortunately it hasn't :-)
>
> ///Peter