Re: [docbook] Entities contain XML tags?

[Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@kovesdan.org>]

On 2012.08.04. 8:42, Dan Shelton wrote:
> Can entities themselves contain XML tags? I'm trying to write my own
> XML parser (for fun) and try to understand when entity expansion
> should be done - before tag parsing, after tag parsing or do entities
> only apply to text data?
They can contain XML tags and they must be well-nested (which means 
something like well-formed but applied to that chunk only; i.e. one root 
element, elements embedded properly, tags closed, attributes quoted).  
And by default they belong to no namespace so if you use them in a 
namespaced document, you most probably want to add a namespace 
declaration to the root element.

Anyway, if you are writing your own parser and you want to make it 
standard-conformant (even though it is just for fun), you should better 
refer to the actual standards than asking on mailing lists:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#entproc

If you do so, you will get more accurate description and there's less 
chance you miss some important aspect.

Regards,
Gabor