How CAN one facilitate re-use of XML components?

[David Megginson]

"Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion at softwareag-usa.com> writes:

> > This is my statement and I stand by it. In my experience the
> > at-scale use of external parsed entities for re-use has only ever
> > led to pain.
> 
> OK, so can I ask the list's opinion on what one CAN do to facilitate
> the re-use of XML components produced by different authors or
> processes?  This is one thing that XML is *supposed* to do well, if
> you believe various bits of hype.

In the SGML world, Eliot Kimber wrote a very well-respected paper on
why separate documents (SUBDOCs) are better than references to
external parsed entities -- I no longer have the URL, unfortunately.

In general, if you want to reuse chunks of XML, there are enormous
advantages to something like

  <included-document src="foo.xml"/>

over

  <!ENTITY foo SYSTEM "foo.ent">

  ...

  &foo;

The XML linking people have done yeoman's (and woman's) work trying to
figure out standard attributes for specifying this kind of
relationship -- I've fallen behind, but perhaps Tim can let us know
where things are right now.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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