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Subject: NBSP entity in topic.mod DTD file
In updating the DTDs for 1.2, I've been reminded again of these 3 peculiar lines in topic.mod: <!-- for use within the DTD and supported topics; these will NOT work outside of this DTD or dtds that specialize from it! --> <!ENTITY nbsp " " > I know Yas Etessam questioned this back in October without an answer: http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/200710/msg00019.html I do not know why this is present. I think it was a mistake - to me, the comment implies that nbsp is useful for the DTD, but not usable outside of topic.mod. In fact, it is not used anywhere in the DTD, and the declaration makes it available to every DITA topic. This includes every specialization as well (each one has to reference topic.mod). Does anybody find this entity useful? Is it appropriate to deprecate it in 1.2? Even if it was a mistake, it is difficult to simply remove it, because I know some editors happily convert the literal #xA0 character into an entity without telling users. Those documents would run in to parsing errors if we removed the declaration. One suggestion that I've heard is to include 2 versions of topic.mod in our DITA 1.2 distribution. One version does not declare NBSP but has everything else. The other (deprecated) version simply declares nbsp and then imports the new version. DTDs included with the package, as well as the default catalog in the package, would refer to the deprecated version, but this would allow other DTD owners to switch at any point. Does anybody have an opinion on this? Thanks - Robert D Anderson IBM Authoring Tools Development Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (507) 253-8787, T/L 553-8787 (Good Monday & Thursday)
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