Re: DOCBOOK: Elements and attributes (was Re: XML Schemas anddocbookdocuments)

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Norman Walsh wrote:

> This clears the way for an element-based approach to character entities
> for schema languages that don't provide for entity declarations. I'm
> thinking of
> 
>   <e:eacute/> or <e:unicode name="latin_capital_letter_E_with_acute"/>
>   (and maybe even <e:isochar name="eacute"/>)
> 
> for &eacute;
> 
> There are lots of reasons why this is less perfect than &eacute; but I
> think there are lots of reasons why it's better than &#x00C9; for many
> applications.

The biggest drawback of this approach which I see is dependence on some
stylesheet or other processing software. Entity references like &eacute;
or &#x00C9; can be resolved by any XML processor -- you can see proper
text of your document even in simple XML browser without any stylesheet.
Using <e:acute/> means that your application knows about "e:" namespace
and it is able to process this. This can be done easily by XSLT, but you
are forced to preprocess your XML each time you want entity refernces
substituted by their original content. IMHO this approach destroys
simplicity of XML.

						Jirka	

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
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