Re: Entities and namespaces in XSchemata

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Sat, 30 May 1998 14:39:27

At 09:14 30/05/98 -0400, John E. Simpson wrote:
>
>Question: I'd understood XSchema to be an attempt to eliminate the need to
>do *any* DTD coding. If that's the case, why define general entities using
>the DTD form? Wouldn't some thing like this work?:
>
><!DOCTYPE xschema SYSTEM xschema.dtd>
><xschema>
> <Entities>
> <EntityType id="greetings.content" repltext="#PCDATA"/>
> </Entities>
> <ElementType id="greetings">
> <Content>
> <Seq repeatable="no" optional="no">&greetings.content;</Seq>
> </Content>
> </ElementType>
></xschema>
>
>That is, why not abstract entity declarations into XSchema form as well as
>the element declarations?

I expect that this is one of the questions that Simon will be asking :-) I
think when I started I had assumed that we might wish to argue for your
example. It might then get translated automatically into:

<!ENTITY greetings.content "#PCDATA">
<!ELEMENT greetings (&greetings.content)>

Whereupon the parser takes over. I had simply suggested that the parser
could operate at an earlier stage. I expect that Simon will guide us
through this :-) and I would expect a question like:

"Do we wish to define entities in an XSchema?"

P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg