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> I kept wondering how something so simple could use such convoluted terms. > An entity to me was something in Entity Relationship modeling. A file was > something you included. A compiland (Pascal) was something you imported - > or a package in Java. What is your point: there should only ever be one name for anything, and it should be the same name that you use? I know COBOL people who get upset that SGML uses "attribute" and "element" so incorrectly. Actually, maybe you do have a point: maybe standards should have an explicit note about terms that have multiple uses in the wild (ISO standards all have a terms and definitions section for this purpose.) That entities are not what we would expect is not a compelling reason for not having them, is it? (Indeed, the failure of XInclude may show that the entity mechanism was in fact pretty practical and could be usefully revived.) > Also the name Extensible Markup Language is a misnomer. XML is not a > language but a general meta grammar for creating and number of > "languages". Well, it certainly is a language in CS terms, because a formal language is just syntactic, and XML certainly is a grammar. Cheers Rick
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