Standalone documents as external parsed entities.

[John Cowan]

Alan Kennedy wrote:

> >From my reading of the XML 1.0 spec, it is not possible to have a
> standalone document, with it's own DTD, "included" in another document
> as an external parsed entity.
> 
> Am I wrong?

You are right.

The nearest you can come in a formal sense is to declare your
standalone document as an *unparsed* entity.   Note that
"unparsed" != "unparsable".

Then you need an application framework capable of recursively
parsing unparsed entities using XML notation, which AFAIK does
not yet exist.

As for your specific problem, if your documents conform to
random DTDs, you have much worse problems than the rules about
external entities.  What is a member name?  What is a country?
Etc.

What is the format of your original documents?  Can you make
them conform to a single DTD, like say XHTML 1.0?

XAF (http://www.megginson.com/XAF) may be helpful.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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