>
> You could put them in a dtd file and have DOCTYPE include that file. I
> wouldn't do that personally because I hate Doctype declarations and the
> such, as well as entities. Alternatives could include 1) using XInclude, 2)
> using XSLT's (or whatever else supports that) document() function to
> swallow them in, 3) putting part of that data in the XSLT file, which is
> what I do for navigation structure most of the time these days (you can
> then access the structure from document('')).
>
I think I just love to argue with Robin, but IMHO there is nothing wrong with
DOCTYPE at all... It defines the SCHEMA for the document, IE what its
structure should be (and in the case of ENTITY how to do some substitutions).
You could in theory consider ENTITY a sort of "Processing Instruction", but
given that it just gives you a way to represent data that would otherwise be
hard to represent (impossible in some cases) in XML otherwise it doesn't seem
to be much more than an "encoding" capability, and thus more akin to a
schematic (part of the syntax of XML) element.
As to it being a maintenance headache. I'm not sure. If you change your
doctype you would essentially be changing the syntax of your document. A lot
of other stuff would generally have to change as well, so who cares really?
If what you are saying is that you have lots of things that are the same in
many documents of different doctypes, then THOSE should be included as
sub-elements of the parent document, which would always have a doctype of
some sort. Of course in many cases you can have DTD-less documents anyhow and
no big deal.
I expect in this particular case it was just not worth Matt's trouble to have
a 2 line DTD in a seperate file.
> > The reason this is important is that it would be a nightmare for
> > constant look-and-feel to have to change every DOCTYPE command in
> > every file
>
> This is not for the look and feel but for the content. However I agree that
> it's a painful solution, which is why I don't use it ;-)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
