Typically those chapters are included as entities in a book file that
does have a doctype and also has any doc-specific entities declared in
the doctype's internal subset. You then validate the book file and in
doing so validate all the files it pulls in as entity references. See
DocBook, The Definitive Guide for more information:
http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch02.html#ch02-physdiv
However, now there's another way to do the same thing in which each part
of the larger document does have its own doctype. See Bob Stayton's book
for a discussion of that:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ModularDoc.html
David
________________________________
From: Fabrice (GMail) [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [docbook-apps] Undeclared entity in Docbook chapters
Hi,
I noticed that some Docbook projects have chapter XML files that
reference entities not declared in the chapter. The chapter will not
validate when loaded in a XML Editor and raise errors with most XML
parsers. This is usually resolved at publish time: a book XML file
references those chapters with entity variables and includes entity
declaration (inline or with a link).
Can someone explain me the benefits (or reasons) of this
approach? Having non-validating XML files seems to defy the purpose of
using XML standards in the first place...
What are the alternatives for writers who want to expose and use
entities in chapters?
Thanks!
Fabrice
