I went through the tutorial. Indeed it worked for my
docbook document. I copied an <emphasis> tag inside a
<para> tag (so it is valid against the docbook DTD).
Xinclude is very convenient to include content into
another file so we can re-use it. Combined with
XPointer you can even include a content chunk, what
you do actually. This is great for content re-use.
The first problem I see is that you have to insert
'structured content', meaning that the text should be
wrapped around tags and it has to be valid against the
DTD when you paste it (if you use any DTD). With
entities, you can reference the text value of the
company without inserting a tag.
Second, the XInclude approach implemented in XXE is ok
until you start making heavy use of it. You can't
write a document in XXE and switch every 2 minutes to
copy/paste the company or product name. In other XML
editors, as soon as you type the '&' character you get
the list of entities declared in the
document(Intellisense) and you can quickly add it. So
you don't really stop the writing process.
My point is that XIncludes and entities definition
serve different purposes. Without support for entities
added to the DTD declaration, XXE users can loose a
lot in productivity.
XXE already supports XML predifined entities (<, >, ',
", &). Is there any chance that in future versions you
add support for entities declared in the DTD (i.e.:
preserve the entity declaration after editing the
document in XXE)?
Also if other XXE users are willing to share their
experience on this 'topic', I would be really happy to
hear from them.
Ciao
Fabrice
PS for Hussein: even though I'm complaining about
entities, I love your product! :-)
--- Hussein Shafie <hussein at pixware.fr> a ?crit :
> Fabrice TALBOT wrote:
> > I guess I'll have to live with it and give up
> using
> > entities if the customer agrees with it.
> >
> > I disagree with this sentence: 'Note that this
> > limitation is not as severe as it seems'.
> Technical
> > writers make use of entities to store a piece of
> > information in a single place and reuse it later,
> like
> > for the company name for instance.
> >
> > The current behavior of XXE prohibits this usage.
> In
> > some technical writing projects, this may be a
> serious
> > limitation.
>
> Our tutorial explains how to do this in a more
> structured way (see the
> VAT example).
>
> The technology used to implement this is XInclude.
>
> But this is transparent to the user who just needs
> to copy a reference
> (to <phrase id="company_name">ACME Ltd</phrase> for
> example) from a
> document just containing ``business objects'' and
> paste it in the
> document he is authoring.
>
>
>
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