Re: Adding entity declarations to DOCTYPE in xml outpu

On Wed, 2019-02-27 at 01:23 +0000, Wendell Piez wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
[...]
> So because it made it easier for EAD (or name-your-vertical SGML
> application) to migrate to XML, entities came along with it. Tail
> wagging dog? Thus evolution lurches forward. It is not at all clear
> in
> retrospect that this was not a correct choice strategically, even if
> it has left us with technical debt of some nature.

If XML had (like HTML) been without an inclusion mechanism of its own,
solutions like XInclude woudlwould have happened sooner. The barely
adequate discourages the excellent.

A problem with entities is that they are in the syntactic domain rather
than representing relationships.

> I think it was a help that XML could support named character
> entities, e.g. & ldquo ; & mdash ; and the like. Since people were
> already used to them from HTML.

That's true, althogh we didn't have an easy way to enable them, and we
never did get back to working on SDATA entities. Maybe that's just as
well.

Liam


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