At 7:07 PM +1100 10/27/02, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>I've never quite cottened on to why XIncludes are useful. Is it because
>the longevity of ID/IDREF means that "document scope" has not gone
>away, yet because entities are not first-class constructs in XML the current
>generation of tools promotes an all-element solution (and bugger the
>structure)?
>
They have one crucial feature external entities don't for me: both
the whole and the part documents can be fully valid documents.
Sometimes I want to publish my whole book. Sometimes I just want to
publish a chapter. Since I'm writing in DocBook with lots of
entities, publishing the chapter requires it to have a DTD and thus a
document type declaration, which prevents it from being an external
parsed entity.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
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