Re: [docbook-tc] Proposal: stop shipping entity sets with DocBook V4.4

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Bob Stayton <bobs@sagehill.net> writes:

> I think removing the entities entirely from the distribution and then
> forcing people to hunt them down and integrate them is a step backwards for
> DocBook.

[...]

I understand what you're saying, but I personally believe it's a
positive step forward if you think about about where DocBook is headed.

What I mean is, the ISO entities were never an essential part of DocBook
to begin with. They were included in the distro and in the DTD as a
convenience for users. At the time when we didn't have editing
applications that supported Unicode, it made some sense to include them.
But I think it makes a lot less sense to do so now.

Along with that, there's the fact that the TC has agreed (I think) to
eventually move to RELAX NG as the normative schema language for
DocBook. One of the first things that users are going to find if/when
they move to doing their authoring and validation using tools that
support RELAX NG is that they probably don't want to continue using
named character entities. Doing so will require including an internal
DTD subset in each and every one of their doc instances, which sort of
defeats the purpose of using RELAX NG to begin with.

  --Mike

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Mark Johnson" <mrj@debian.org>
> To: <docbook-tc@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 9:44 AM
> Subject: [docbook-tc] [docbook] Proposal: stop shipping entity sets with
> DocBook V4.4
> 
> 
> > I punt my vote to Adam Di Carlo (Hi Adam:) on this one, since he packages
> > DocBook and some entities for Debian, and has a much better sense of the
> > packaging issues.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > > I think it's time to stop shipping our own hacked sets with DocBook.
> > >
> > > Pro: - one less set of entities in the world
> > >      - makes the distribution smaller
> > >      - fixes a recently reported bug that the mapping for hyphen
> > >        is incorrect in the current sets
> > >      - relies on an external standard for XML entities just like for
> SGML
> > >        entities
> > >      - means that a single set can be shared across all of a users
> documents
> > >
> > > Con: - one more thing for the end user to install
> > >      - I don't know if they're packaged yet
> > >      - the system identifier will hit the net if you aren't using a
> catalog
> > >        of some sort
> > >
> > >
> > > On balance, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I doubt that'll
> > > get unanimous agreement.
> >