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Re: The XSL-List Digest V1 #266

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Joe Kesselman  writes
  It doesn't address general entities. Remember, an entity may represent an
  extended block of data, possibly external to this file, and possibly not
  being XML-formatted. We have to be able to refer to those by entity name.



If the parser does keep a node for an entity reference and make the
replacement text a child of this. Does that mean every application has
to take account of this explicitly? If I want to search for an element
with a particular content, do I have to explicitly allow for the fact
that the content may be referenced indirectly through an entity ref?
My understanding of entities was that the parser would always replace
them by their content, so any application working on the parsed data
need not worry about such issues.

As Paul Prescod mentioned earlier what is needed is a clear statement of
what the "XML data model" is. It is hard to see how one can use XML
as the concrete syntax of any language (not just XSL) if it is not
sufficiently well specified how that syntax is to be parsed. If it is
not specified what tokens will result from parsing your stylesheet (or
your document) how on earth can the XSL recommendation hope to specify
what should happen next?

David (feeling depressed)


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