XML online and Entities

[Tim Bray]

At 10:09 AM 18/06/97 -0700, David Schach wrote:
>This kind of bug will be common because SGML allows the & to be used
>this way. I think this difference in entity processing unnecessarily
>complicates SGML to XML conversion.

Yes, this kind of bug will be common.  The chance of changing this
in XMl-lang is very small.  One of the bogosities that make SGML parsers 
hard to write is that entity references are nontrivial to recognize.  When
I'm teaching XMl, it's *so nice* to be able to say: all markup without
exception starts with '<' or '&', and anything that starts with
'<' or '&', without exception, is markup.  End of story.  Users like it,
programmers like it.

So, what's the solution?  If all else fails, a postprocessor that
takes <a href="/cgi-bin/frobnisticate?a1=mona;a2=lisa;a3=overdrive">
and changes the ;'s to &'s on the way off to the server?

 -Tim

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