Re: feature request

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv at dyomedea dot com>]

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
>  In XML 1.0, entities are the most flexible
>  and widely supported way to manage external relationships, so that's
>  what I use.
> 
> I have to say that looking around my local disk for multiple file
> documents I'd have to acknowledge that they all use external parsed
> entities and none of them use xlink (or xinclude), and many of them use
> MathML which has over a thousand internal `character entities' as well,

If you are optimist, you may say that it's because XLink and XInclude
are not old enough ;=)

> However I would still argue that conceptually entities are by design
> distinct from the document structure, they allow an author to split up
> the file as he or she pleases, without having any effect on the logical
> document. So if you use entities you are supposed to _expect_ that an
> application expands them and you are not supposed to care. (I do care,
> but you are supposed to do as I say, not as I do:-)
> 

Another partial solution could be to define an extension which would :

1) include the nested output tree in an external document (like
xsl:document).
2) include the reference to this document as en external entity in the
current document.

The external entity would still have to be predefined first as suggested
by Dave.

This wouldn't solve the problem of preserving the original information
but would allow to generate such files.

Eric
-- 
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Eric van der Vlist       Dyomedea                    http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org         http://4xt.org              http://ducotede.com
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