Use of '&' in element of XML Document

John E. Simpson simpson at polaris.net
Wed Jul 28 01:14:39 BST 1999


At 05:20 PM 07/27/1999 -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:
>You cannot redeclare & which is one of XML's predefined
>entities [1].  Just use & in place of &--no declaration
>is necessary.
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-predefined-ent

Actually, that's not 100% true: while & is a pre-defined entity, the
questioner expressly mentioned that he/she wanted to use a DTD. As the
second paragraph of the REC's section that you pointed to says:

	All XML processors must recognize these entities whether they are 
	declared or not. For interoperability, valid XML documents should 
	declare these entities, like any others, before using them. 

I believe the word "valid" there says that you can reliably use them
without declaration only in well-formed documents. If you want an
interoperable DTD, they've got to be declared. 

==========================================================
John E. Simpson            | The secret of eternal youth
simpson at polaris.net        | is arrested development.
http://www.flixml.org      |  -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

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