Q: Using XML entities for href's

Eve L. Maler elm at arbortext.com
Mon Mar 2 17:52:36 GMT 1998


It's legal to reference a parsed entity from an attribute value, and every
XML processor should be able to handle it.  To do this properly, the
reference would have to look like this:

<aTag xml-link="simple" href="&aRef;">content</aTag>

(Using an ENTITY-type attribute wouldn't automatically expand it in place,
and anyway, has to be used exclusively with unparsed entities -- those with
an NDATA notation.)

	Eve

At 11:30 AM 3/2/98 -0500, Steffen Rodig wrote:
>> At 03:53 PM 3/2/98 +0100, Steffen Rodig wrote:
>>>In my xml based application I want to write xml documents with some
>>>kind of indirect links, since I don't know the exact location of a
>>>link target at the time a document is created and stored into a
>>>repository. I got the idea to use the entity concept of xml for doing
>>>this,
>> [...]
>>><?XML VERSION="1.0"?>
>>><!DOCTYPE CP-Document PUBLIC "-//SDM SHORE//DTD CP-Document//EN" [
>>><!ENTITY aRef SYSTEM "http://aServer/aDocument#anElement">
>>>]>
>>>...
>>><aTag xml-link=simple href=aRef>content</aTag>
>>>...
>
>> We have an almost identical challenge, with the added qualifications that
>
>> a) all our pages are customized and generated on the fly, out of the
>> repository;
>> b) we need to generate HTML, so that pages can be viewed and navigated
>> with today's HTML browsers.
>
>Does this mean, that you create HTML out of data structures that are in
>no way related to [X|HT]ML?
>
>We want to stick with XML in the repository 'cause we believe that XML-
>enabled browsers will become available soon. At the moment we plan an
>on-the-fly conversion to HTML as well.
>
>XML is not our intermediate format, it's going to be our basic format
>for the documents in the repository with elements forming objects
>and links forming relations among them.
>
>> ...
>
>> I see no reason why your approach wouldn't work with XML browsers.
>
>Ok, but is it valid XML, i.e. will a XML processor find the URL from
>the symbolic identifier?

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