Re: use cases for d-o-e

> I mean, you
> can create processing instructions, elements, attributes and comments; why
> leave entities out of the mix?

entities are designed to be author shortcut facility, the whole point is
thatyou can use an entity to give a shorthand and any XML application
essentially won't see it, it's just a syntactic variation like using "
or ' around attribute values.

If it wasn't this way you'd have to be worried about whether it was ever
"safe" to make an entity or whetehr you always need to enter th efully
expanded version. This is completely different to pis and elements which
don't expand to anything they are just data items (aka nodes aka
infoset items).

So Xpath arranges this by fully expanding entities as the first thing it
does and never "seeing" them at all. This model is almost allways what
you want on input, although it does sometimes complicate the issue of
generating the entity refs on output.

David


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