DOCBOOK: Errors in iso-num.ent ?

["Carole E. Mah" <carolem at mama dot stg dot brown dot edu>]

A user of our XML Validator
(http://www.stg.brown.edu/service/xmlvalid/) reported some errors in the
official docbookx.dtd, specifically in the called entity file iso-num.ent.

These errors occurred because of the way that the unicode character
replacements for the isonum entities are handled for the XML markup
characters.

I discovered this when I discovered that the official docbook iso-num.ent
file already deals with some cases of this problem, namely < and
&. However, it does not deal with " and ; so I'm thinking
the same hack needs to be used for these as well (the hack being to make a
decimal code replacement rather than a unicode replacement for these
characters).

I made these changes in a local copy of the docbook dtd. Compare
  http://www.stg.brown.edu/dtds/docbook_xml/ent/iso-num.ent
with
  http://www.stg.brown.edu/dtd/docbook_xml/ent/iso-num-old.ent

Am I right in my diagnosis of this problem, or should I instead be making
some modification to our XML Validator?

thanks,
-carole
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
Carole E. Mah                     carolem@stg.brown.edu
               Programmer/Analyst
   Brown University Scholarly Technology Group
               phn 401-863-2669
               fax 401-863-9313
            http://www.stg.brown.edu/
  personal: http://www.stg.brown.edu/~carolem/