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Re: [xsl] Entities within my stylesheet.


Subject: Re: [xsl] Entities within my stylesheet.
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 11:52:25 -0400

At 2002-09-24 16:38 +0100, Yago Alvarado wrote:
   In several places I've seen people using entities within their
stylesheets.

Yes, this can be very useful and I use them a lot in my stylesheets.


See example below:

XML:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data></test></data>

XSL:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [

Use "xsl:stylesheet" above.


<!ENTITY ntilde  "&#241;" ><!-- small n, tilde -->
]>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
        &ntilde;
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>


I've seen this many times but I've never managed to make it work.


I always get an error like:

ERROR: The name of the top most element must match the name of the DOCTYPE
declaration.

That's right, because the name of the document element isn't the same as what you declared it should be in your document type declaration.


btw I'm using MSXML 4 SP1 (Could this be the problem?)

No, but be aware that MSXML is unable to handle error reporting at all well when utilizing external parameter entities. This has become a real handicap in my teaching of XSL-FO during the exercises for those students using XSL-FO processors based on MSXML. I use entities to manage page geometry for an international audience, and MSXML gets *very* confused when there is a syntax error elsewhere in the document. When there are no well-formedness errors, everything works just fine, so I can still use MSXML, but when the student makes a simple typo, there is no useful information regarding where the error is. It is very frustrating, it is out of the vendor's hands since they are at a point where they are obliged to use MSXML, and I have to justify this at every course.


I hope this helps.

.................... Ken


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