Hey Greg,
At 12:50 PM 10/18/2002, you wrote:
Is there a consensus regarding how best to handle references to unparsed
external entities (e.g. graphics) in an XML document during transformation?
The consensus is that support in XSLT for external unparsed entities is
pretty lame; where opinions split is on whether this is a good thing (since
unparsed entities are evil, you know, everything should be URIs and MIME
types) or whether it's just bone-headed, reducing almost to unusability a
standard XML feature that we'd like to take advantage of. In any case,
we're lucky we even have the unparsed-entity-uri() function, which was
added to XSLT fairly late when it was pointed out that they're really not
that uncommon in XML especially if it's migrated from SGML systems.
One rationale for the lack of support is that XSLT isn't really made for
arbitrary data-management and data-processing transforms (though it be used
for that all the time), but rather is intended only to target a display format.
It would be nice to have such entities stored in a table when the document
is first read in, such that an XSL transformation can read from and write
to the table, and such that the table is again written out in the
document's internal DTD subset after transformation is complete.
Wouldn't it? This sounds like something very nice for XSLT 2.0. Off hand, I
don't know what what they're planning if anything. (Can anyone speak to
that? Jeni?)
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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