[XML-SIG] Proposed XBEL DTD

[Sean Mc Grath]

[Greg Stein]
>I think you guys are making this overly complicated. I don't see any DTD
>out there that specifies additional entities. Instead, standard
>character encoding is used.

I agree with Greg on this point.

>
>I seem to recall reading somewhere that part of the purpose of XML was
>to get rid of all the random entities that HTML had (which were
>generally not universally recognized anyhow), and to limit the entities
>down to just a handful. Those handful of entities are builtin to XML
>parsers and do not require specification in a DTD. (lt, gt, etc)

Yes. For compatibility with SGML, the spec. suggests that DTDs define
the entities that XML builds in but is SGML compatability really
important for XBEL? And even if it is, will SGML users be put out?
I think not. I use SGML a lot and not having the entities
declared in XBEL does not worry me in the least. The pre-eminent
SGML parser SP will infer them automatically if you ask it to
parse XML as SGML. I suspect the same will be true of all
SGML tools in the future.

As for the iso entity sets, most of the need for these things goes
out the window with XML as Unicode is the character set. Yes, you still
need entities for things like chemical symbols and so on but must
human language symbols are dealt with by Unicode (including Klingon:-).

Looking to the future a bit:-

<PossibleHeresyAlert>
I can see the entire entity architecture of XML being depracated
in favour of transclusion etc. via XLink.

I can see DTDs becoming a "compatability only" way of doing schemas.

9 out of 10 XBEL aware apps will use non-validating XML parsing!
</PossibleHeresyAlert>

Sean Mc Grath

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