Subject: Entities Was: RE: [xsl] use cases for d-o-e From: Joerg Pietschmann <joerg.pietschmann@xxxxxx> Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 17:03:10 +0100 |
"Bryan Rasmussen" <bry@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > anyway > in situations like this it might be useful to output entities into the > document, because the document is one that will be edited further down the > line by a human. Do you expect them to use generic text editors? I was under the impression that XML editors and related tools have been evolved to a stage where entities are no longer a significant advantage. But i may be biased, my editing environment (Emacs+PSGML, XMetal) doesn't add much comfort for entities while everything else is much more enjoyable than using a plain text editor. Particularly XMetal seems to actively discourage the usage of entities. As for alternatives: For character references, even moderately sophisticated editors could display the correct glyph or a human readable name regardless of what's in the file. For everything else, either expand it or use markup in case you have to eleminate redundancies. For example, instead of <!DOCTYPE doc SYSTEM "doc.dtd" [ <!ENTITY author "Random J. Hacker"> ]> <doc> <title>Stuff by &author;</title> <section> <para>The person &author; did... ... use <doc> <references> <person id="author"> <name>Random J. Hacker</name> </person> </references> <title>Stuff by <refname id="author"/></title> <section> <para>The person <refname id="author"/> did... ... Of course, you'll have to have an editor which can be customized to do something sensible with the references, and some ressources to do the customization (the latter is usually the killer). Hiring a good data designer may also be a good idea (but may turn out to be a showstopper too, sadly). As for the relation between entities and performance: until namespaces were introduced, XML parsers indeed could have entities preparsed and thereby saved some time. Whether this would save much is doubtful, because the preparsed tree would have to be copied when the reference is encountered, an operation which is nearly as expensive as constructing the tree by parsing a string. Furthermore, i believe using a similar optimization in SGML would additionally require some non-trivial bookkeeping so that no one ever did this back then. Regards J.Pietschmann XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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