Comments and entities was:

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The XML spec leans heavily in the direction of Entity References being
> resolved and flattened as the document is read in, which is fine for
> browsers but may not be acceptable for earlier stages of processing.

With the (on the face of it) equivalent concept of internal entities in
SGML one is (I think) forced to do that as there is no `internal entity'
node in the grove model (as used by dsssl for example). It seems to be a
great shame that this is not specified in XML. I would have preferred
it to be specified that they are always resolved, but leaving it
unspecified seems to be the worst possible outcome.

The DOM also specifies a slightly odd behaviour of keeping comments
(which means they are not comments any more). Could  you confirm what
happens in a DOM based XSL system if I go


 <xsl:template match="apply">
   <!-- hello world: this is a comment in my stylesheet -->
 <xsl:apply-templates 
     .....

Does the comment node find its way into the template and then into the
output document?  I really hope it doesn't but if I understand what you
are saying, and my (rather brief) reading of the dom spec, I fear it
might.

David
 


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