Re: [docbook] Proposal: stop shipping entity sets with DocBook V4.4

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

To the Pro list, you might also add:

  - named entities are a legacy convenience feature, inherited from
    SGML, that users should not be encouraged to continue using

I personally think we ought to be encouraging users to move to doing
their authoring and validation using tools that support Unicode and that
are driven by modern schema languages (RELAXG NG and W3 XML Schema),
which don't support named entities unless you declare them in an
internal DTD subset in each and every one of your doc instances.

  --Mike

Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes:

> The ISO entity sets are now maintained in XML at the W3C:
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/
> 
> I think it's time to stop shipping our own hacked sets with DocBook.
> 
> Pro: - one less set of entities in the world
>      - makes the distribution smaller
>      - fixes a recently reported bug that the mapping for hyphen
>        is incorrect in the current sets
>      - relies on an external standard for XML entities just like for SGML entities
>      - means that a single set can be shared across all of a users documents
> 
> Con: - one more thing for the end user to install
>      - I don't know if they're packaged yet
>      - the system identifier will hit the net if you aren't using a catalog of
>        some sort
> 
> On balance, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I doubt that'll
> get unanimous agreement.
> 
>                                         Be seeing you,
>                                           norm
>

Attachment: pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature