[docbook-tc] Re: xml ISO entities (was Re: DocBook TC Meeting Minutes:21 May 2002)

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com> was heard to say:
| So... these are *ISO* entities, right?  We all appreciate Norm's hard
| work in making these available, but why should they be considered
| really inherently an element of DocBook and owned by DocBook?  I think
| they should probably be packaged and distributed separately, either as
| merely SGML and XML ISO entities, or part of a greater "baseline SGML
| and XML entities and declarations, etc" package.

The XML Character Entities specification is an attempt to make it
possible to distribute them separately.

|> We should come up with some mechanism for clearly identifying the
|> files (internally) and indicate that they should not be changed.
|
| If you do really want to consider them DocBook specific, then I
| suppose I should ship both a standard ISO entity set for XML and SGML,
| as well as a DocBook ISO entity set.  I would also suggest shipping a
| catalog file in the ent subdir, and we should probably rename the
| files to say 'docbook' or at least clearly indicate "DocBook" in the
| official public identifiers.

No, I don't want to go there. We don't ship the SGML ones because
they're available elsewhere. We got painted into a corner of sorts
with the XML ones because there was no obvious set we could point to
and say "use those".

I'm trying to get out of that corner.

| I peronsally think establishing a separate, shared package for XML and
| SGML ISO entities would be more constructive for the overall XML/SGML
| community.  I might be able to help with such an effort...

That's the plan. I got unofficial blessing from some of the original
ISO folks behind 8879 to do this through OASIS. The complication now
is that MathML at W3C is doing exactly the same thing for similar
reasons.

I don't want to do this work if someone else will, so I'm trying to
coordinate with the MathML folks.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Wink at small faults; for thou has
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | great ones.--Thomas Fuller (II)
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |