At 04:29 PM 3/7/2003, Oleg wrote:
Is it poor design to use these character entities?
This is an excellent question.
With my documentary biases, I'd like to see the containing XML have the
necessary declarations so you could use your character entities
transparently. In the kind of systems I have experience with (mainly
publishing systems of various kinds) I believe this could be done fairly
straightforwardly in most cases, although it's admittedly something else
to manage.
btw, wouldn't XInclude or XLink a better solution?
See this is what I mean by "operational requirements"; it might be that you
have XInclude/XLinking already working, so this is less overhead for you to
manage than the traditional declaration sets. I wouldn't say
XInclude/XLinking is more portable in practice (and wouldn't presume to
speak for its other advantages).
There are two sides (and a middle) to the debate on whether external parsed
entities should be avoided altogether. And there are different applications
of external parsed entities.
Cheers,
Wendell
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