DOCBOOK: where to store entity references

[Erik Price <pricee at hhbrown dot com>]

I have two more (hopefully easy) questions...

I have a large file of internal general entity references that I have 
made to save myself the trouble of hand-typing the same markup for 
certain items in my documents that are repeated in many places.  This is 
(AFAICT) the custom.

But I also have a few dozen external general entity references, which I 
am using in imitation of the examples in "DocBook: The Definitive 
Guide" -- each of my "sect1" elements is in its own file (for ease of 
maintenance).  I have one "master" file, called "documentation.xml", 
which consists of little more than a hierarchy of "book"s, "part"s, and 
"chapter"s, and an external general entity reference within each chapter 
for each "sect1" element.  In other words, this file has the structure, 
whereas the subfiles have all of the meat.

Since I am not including an internal DTD (rather I am using the DocBook 
DTD), I haven't made any entity declarations in my document yet.  I am 
assuming that I can do them within the system identifier, like this:

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" 
"system.identifier"
[
	<!ENTITY ent1 SYSTEM "path/to/file">
	<!ENTITY ent2 SYSTEM "path/to/file">
	<!ENTITY ent3 SYSTEM "path/to/file">
]
>

Instead of putting all of the entities directly at this point, can I 
just keep them in their separate file and declare an entity reference to 
the file full of entity declarations?  Like this:

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" 
"system.identifier"
[
	<!ENTITY entityfile SYSTEM "path/to/file">
	&entityfile;
]
>

Now will all of my entities (in that file) be "included" into the 
document?


The other question I have is, can I specify a relative path to a file in 
an external general entity reference?  Like above?  Or should it start 
with "./path/to/file" to indicate "current working directory"?

Or must those paths be absolute?



Thanks very much for your help,


Erik



----

Erik Price
Web Developer Temp
Media Lab, H.H. Brown
pricee@hhbrown.com