Re: writing entity references.

[James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
> James Clark writes
> 
> > I would say it was an abuse of XML to attach semantic significance to
> > the entity names
> 
> Yes, I suspected that that would be the official answer, and really
> I do agree with that point of view.

That wasn't an official answer. Everything I say on this list is just my
personal point of view (unless I say otherwise).

> While this is something of a special situation, I would have thought
> that if XSL is being used as a transformation language (only) to
> write out XML instances, it would be quite a common request to write
> out the instances in a `natural' manner (using entities defined in some
> dtd) rather than necessarily writing all characters as numeric character
> entities, or directly` as unicode characters.

I agree that there is a practical problem here, but it's not clear how
to me how solve it cleanly without either introducing huge complexity,
or without opening loopholes that invite abuse.

Maybe a result-dtd-system-id and result-dtd-public-id attributes on
xsl:stylesheet would be a potential solution.  An XSL engine could
output the appropriate DOCTYPE declaration, but could also read the DTD
so as to find an appropriate entity corresponding to a particular
Unicode code point.

James



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