Re: Access to unparsed entities

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Subject: Re: Access to unparsed entities
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 13:52:33 -0400

Hey Greg,

At 12:50 PM 10/18/2002, you wrote:

Is there a consensus regarding how best to handle references to unparsed
external entities (e.g. graphics) in an XML document during transformation?

The consensus is that support in XSLT for external unparsed entities is pretty lame; where opinions split is on whether this is a good thing (since unparsed entities are evil, you know, everything should be URIs and MIME types) or whether it's just bone-headed, reducing almost to unusability a standard XML feature that we'd like to take advantage of. In any case, we're lucky we even have the unparsed-entity-uri() function, which was added to XSLT fairly late when it was pointed out that they're really not that uncommon in XML especially if it's migrated from SGML systems.

One rationale for the lack of support is that XSLT isn't really made for arbitrary data-management and data-processing transforms (though it be used for that all the time), but rather is intended only to target a display format.

It would be nice to have such entities stored in a table when the document
is first read in, such that an XSL transformation can read from and write
to the table, and such that the table is again written out in the
document's internal DTD subset after transformation is complete.

Wouldn't it? This sounds like something very nice for XSLT 2.0. Off hand, I don't know what what they're planning if anything. (Can anyone speak to that? Jeni?)

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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Current Thread
Access to unparsed entities Gregory Murphy - Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:46:47 -0400 (EDT) Wendell Piez - Fri, 18 Oct 2002 13:55:09 -0400 (EDT) <= Jeni Tennison - Fri, 18 Oct 2002 18:55:39 -0400 (EDT) Gregory Murphy - Sun, 20 Oct 2002 19:29:22 -0400 (EDT) <Possible follow-ups> DPawson - Mon, 21 Oct 2002 04:00:35 -0400 (EDT) Michael Kay - Mon, 21 Oct 2002 05:49:36 -0400 (EDT)

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Access to unparsed entities, Gregory Murphy	Thread	Re: Access to unparsed entiti, Jeni Tennison
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