Re: [xsl] Adding entity declarations to DOCTYPE in xml output

["Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2019-02-26 at 21:53 +0000, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> That general requirement (simple string macros) can be satisfied
> using XInclude, which is implemented by most, if not all, of the
> modern XML parsers.

Pretty much. It's unfortuate that we never added control over XInclude
processing to the doc() function in XPath/XQuery/XSLT/...

> I could go farther and say that the original SGML design of DTDs was
> entirely misguided as well and should never have been done that way
> and certainly shouldn't have been carried into XML (again, I
> certainly argued *for* them at the time)

It's questionable as to have far from SGML we could have taken XML and
had it go anywhere. As it was for a while i was getting daily calls
from someone called Charles opposed to making DTDs optional :-)


>  but that's easy for me to say now. At the time that SGML was being
> defined and implemented the DTD syntax seemed perfectly sensible and
> it took a long time for us to recognize the inherent problems with
> DTDs as they exist in SGML and XML.
> 
> In particular, because they are a purely syntactic mechanism DTDs are
> a security risk and provide no reliable declaration of the actual
> semantic document type of the document that exhibits the DOCTYPE
> declaration.

You're right - public identifiers do *not* do what many people think,
and neither does a DOCTYPE declaration. A combination of a namespace
URI and a version attribute seems better, but is still not perfect.

It always bugged me that SGML DTDs didn't guarantee a particular root
element. Yuribs take was to point out that he could write a book
starting with a single paragraph and working outwards, and have the
document remain DTD-valid at all times. But that just says that SGML
needed a separate concept of document-valid alongside what-you-have-
here valid.

Liam


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