Switch to W3C/ISO character entity sets

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

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The DocBook TC has maintained unofficial sets of character entities
for XML since the first DocBook XML release. This was necessary
because there was no official ISO 8879 entity set suitable for XML.

While that is still technically true, some progress has been made.
David Carlisle has arranged http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/ and
efforts are continuing to get an official ISO blessing for these
entity sets.

I propose that we cease distribution of our own set of entities in the
next release of DocBook (specifically, V4.3b6 and beyond) and point
instead to the W3C/ISO sets.

There is at least one known bug in the sets distributed with DocBook,
so it's inappropriate to continue to use them. But I am reluctant to
fix our unofficial distribution and introduce yet another unofficial
set into the wild. It seems much more sensible to me to switch to the
W3C/ISO sets.

I can see only two drawbacks:

1. The W3C/ISO sets do not yet have any official public identifiers. I
propose that we use only a system identifier until such time as the
W3C/ISO settle that issue.

2. Users will have to modify the catalogs (or other resolution
mechanisms) that they employ to avoid hitting the web every time they
validate with the DTD.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Everything should be made as
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | simple as possible, but no simpler.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |
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