Thanks for clarifying this. Please treat me as the archetypal newcomer
who means well.
Understood. This is in fact what I do, but I was slightly misled
in the draft by the phrase under 'EMBED':
the 'designated resource should be embedded for the purposes of display or
processing in the body of the resource and at the location where the traversal
started'. I (mis)read that to mean that the spec required the remote
resource to be emebedded and then processed (i.e. parsed).
I also share your concern with the likelihood of linking to a document
without a DOCTYPE which may have tags in common and where there is a
possibility of confusion. Since you point out that 'embedding' is really a
pointer, then the application can keep the namespaces separate, though it
could be easy to make mistakes.
[...]
> One confusion factor here is that, unlike SGML today (but not in the near
> future), if an XML file has no DOCTYPE declaration it can be used as either
> an external text entity (parsed in the context of its reference) or as a
> document entity (parsed in isolation), and you can't tell by looking at the
> entity which it was intended to be. In a very real sense, XML is saying
> that all external entities are either subdocuments or documents, even
> though XML doesn't include the formal notion of subdocument as in SGML.
Exactly. And it is possible to see cases where a given file is used in
both ways (a) included through entities and (b) pointed to by LINK.
[... thanks for the explanation of notation ...] I had not appreciated
the use of the NOTATION to flag PI-types and will adopt this.
P.
-- Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection Virtual School of Molecular Sciences http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/