[XML-SIG] State of the world

[Fred L. Drake]

Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin@cnri.reston.va.us> said:
 > I think the way around it would be to have every document start with
 > an XML declaration. That will make conforming parsers throw an error
 > when the new document starts, which can be (maybe with a little 
 > extension to the parsers) be caught and used to trigger some code that
 > makes the parser consider the rest of the stream a new document.

Jack Jansen writes:
 > I think this is all a bad idea. The "xml way" of doing things is to
 > have a single object per file, and I see no reason why we shouldn't
 > conform to that. After all, if you need multiple objects you can


  I think this is where the SGML distinction between an "entity" and a 
file makes a lot of sense.  Each XML entity can be exactly one
instance, but an entity manager can be used to access multiple
entities in a single file.  Each entity can be individually retrieved
from the file using the entity manager.  As expected, this is only
useful (as far as allowing other tools to work directly on our files)
if our entity manager behaves the same way as theirs does.  Which
means, at least for now, one file === one entity.
  I can live with that.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive    Reston, VA  20191