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At 8:49 PM -0800 2/3/02, Tim Bray wrote: >But general parsed entities... yecch. Doing content aggregation >at the lexical level feels wrong. They cause all sorts of >baroque complexity in APIs. Non-validating parsers don't read >them. They cause all sorts of complexity for ID/IDREF management, >and they complicate namespace processing horribly. They are >totally aimed at document/publishing applications of XML, and >in my experience, they don't work that well there. Eliot Kimber >was telling us 8 years ago that they were basically broken and >we weren't smart enough to realise he was right. > But they're a really sweet syntax sugar when I can't remember the exact keys to hit to get a curly quote, an em dash or an e with accent acute. Can you imagine trying to sell XHTML to designers without and ©? The problems seem to lie beyond this, when larger parts of the document are pulled in. The difference between external and internal parsed entities may be relevant. I must admit I can't think of many cases where I've seen external parsed entities used outside of textbook examples. Not that any of this can be fixed now. :-( -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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