Entities as template placeholders?

[Ronald Bourret]

Matt Sergeant wrote:

> > I'm writing a temlpate system. Original is XML. Is it legal /
> > sensible to
> > use entitites as template place holders? Like, vairable or something.
> >
> > Example (bogus):
> >
> > (...)
> > <SET NAME="var" VALUE="Great">
> > <HTML:IMG SRC="truc.gif" ALT="&var;">
> > (..)
> >
> > The HTML:IMG's ALT parameter will then contain "Great".
>
> No it won't. It's not valid XML. You can't do what you want to do - use
> something else. Try a dollar or something - people will be used to that 
sort
> of thing both from perl and from XSL.

The syntax shown is incorrect, but the idea is valid. That is, you can 
refer to an internal general entity in an attribute value (see section 
4.4.5 of the XML spec). The correct syntax for the entity declaration is:

   <!ENTITY var "Great">

Note that this declaration must be in the internal subset. References to 
external general entities in attribute values are illegal.

-- Ron Bourret


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