Re: Resolving ENTITY attributes

Subject: Re: Resolving ENTITY attributes
From: Richard Light <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 08:20:02 +0100
In message <372936F1.39179332@xxxxxxxxxx>, James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
writes
>Richard Light wrote:
> 
>> Reading the XSLT spec, I don't see a way of resolving ENTITY-type
>> attribute values.
>...
>> Is there a way to do this? 
>
>There isn't a way to do this.
>
>> If not, I think there should be.
>
>There is no plan to provide this functionality in version 1.0.  This
>means that in XSLT 1.0 you'll have to use extensions to do almost
>anything useful with ENTITY attributes.

I find that rather extraordinary.  I've spent a few days playing with
IE5 and a real-life project, and that is one of the first and most
obvious things I wanted to do: to get the illustrations to display in
the HTML output from XSL.  

Is the implication that recording external non-XML entities in ENTITY
attributes, rather than HREF-type CDATA attributes or element content,
is a deprecated technique in XML?

Even if there isn't full support in XSL 1.0, isn't it possible to say
that the 'string value' of an ENTITY attribute is delivered by looking
up the entity's SYSTEM identifier and providing that?  For most
purposes, that would be quite adequate.

Richard Light.

Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy
richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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