Re: localizing XML/XSLT with entities?

["John E. Simpson" <simpson at polaris dot net>]

At 09:33 PM 02/04/2000 -0500, Ray Cromwell wrote:
>Simply put, Mozilla uses XML entities to reference what C++/GUI coders
>and Java codes would refer to as resources or ResourceBundles.
>
>Thus, instead of writing something like
>
>they write Then, all of the locale specific content it put into ENTITY 
>declarations in an external DTD located via a chrome:// URI that fetches 
>the DTD from the appropriate directory. What confuses me, is if the XUL 
>document already has a !DOCTYPE declaration referencing the XUL DTD, is it 
>legal to reference a second external DTD? Is there a legal way for DTD's 
>to include another DTD or a bunch of entity declarations? Or, for a 
>document to reference multiple DTD's at once? I know you can use external 
>entities in the main document, but ideally, you would like to separate all 
>the entity declarations into an external file making it easy to edit 
>locale specific content in a single location without mucking with the main 
>document DTD. I suppose you could use xsl:include/import and load up a 
>whole bunch of statements to get the same effect, but the syntax for 
>referencing variables isn't quite as nice as entities, and sometimes the 
>source XML document needs localization. -Ray

I don't know what the Mozilla code looks like; your mailer seems to have 
stripped out anything that looks like markup. But it sounds like they're 
using INCLUDE/EXCLUDE "conditional" sections in the DTD, together with 
external parameter entities for incorporating other DTDs which, yes, is a 
legal and (not always, but sometimes!) useful approach.

An example in the XML Rec. [3.4]:

   <!ENTITY % draft 'INCLUDE' >
   <!ENTITY % final 'IGNORE' >

   <![%draft;[
   <!ELEMENT book (comments*, title, body, supplements?)>
   ]]>
   <![%final;[
   <!ELEMENT book (title, body, supplements?)>
   ]]>

The PEs in the first two lines tell the DTD that in its current pass, the 
processor should include the declaration of the book element performed by 
the %draft; PE, and *not* include that performed by the %final; PE. If you 
want the processing to treat the book element as though it declares a 
"final version's" content model, just switch the INCLUDE/IGNORE values of 
the two PEs.

(Further discussion along these lines probably should move off-list, or to 
XML-L or XML-DEV.)
====================================================================
John E. Simpson            |  My girlfriend asked me, "Did you sleep
simpson@polaris.net        |  good?" I said, "No, I made a few
http://www.flixml.org      |  mistakes." (Stephen Wright)


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