Re: DOCBOOK: external entities cannot be valid?

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Jorge Godoy <godoy@conectiva.com.br> was heard to say:
| On Sat, Feb 26, 2000 at 10:16:40AM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
| > / Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com> was heard to say:
| > | Option B: Include the doctype declaration in each chapter
| > [...]
| > 
| > You couldn't do this with SGML, either, so I'm a little
| > confused.
| 
| Is there any special reason for this not being valid? It would help a
| lot developing modularized documents. 

It's just part of the definition of a "document" in SGML and
XML.  On the surface it would seem reasonable to ignore
duplicate declarations, but it would introduce some nasty
complexity, I fear, in handling entity declarations and mixed
document types.

Anyway, the XML answer to this problem is almost certainly
xinclude (http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude), which is a layer on
top of the XML parser.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The human race consists of the
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | dangerously insane and such as are
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | not.--Mark Twain