document vs non-document entity (was Re: CORBA's not boring yet. / XML in an OS?)

[James Tauber]

Paul Prescod:
>This is a serious problem inherited from SGML. It is my opinion that
>instead of namespace declarations being done through attributes they
>should have been just another form of PI-based declaration. Then in
>version 2.0 of XML, all declarations should have been made "localizable."
>In particular, there should be a way to declare internal text entities,
>unparsed entities and attribute defaults locally.

Well this is actually where my thinking has been going. I've been thinking
about whether localizable declarations might be achievable using an
*attribute* mechanism following on from how namespaces ended up.

Eg

<Root>
    ...
        <SomeElement xmldecl="local-decl.pen">
            <!-- markup declarations in local-decl.pen apply -->
        </SomeElement>
    ...
</Root>

The xmldecl attribute takes the value of the URI of an external parameter
entity.

To avoid name clashes, it might be an idea to have
xmldecl:foo="local-decl.pen" and then qualify entities with the prefix foo
(ie &foo:SomeEntity;)

James

--
James Tauber / jtauber at jtauber.com / www.jtauber.com
Associate Researcher, Electronic Commerce Network
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia




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