Sorry but improvments and/or workarounds related to the support of
entities are not planned.
* This would impossible to implement given the way XXE has been
designed. That is, it would require a major rewrite; or at least we
currently don't see how to implement support of text entities without a
major rewrite.
* XXE *really* can be used to author modular documents, in a simple,
clean and productive way. (We, here at XMLmind, do that all the time).
- We don't believe in XXE as a solution (!!!). It is currently half
a solution: the authoring tool. The other half is an intelligent XML
backend which manages complex, versioned, composite, etc, documents
(among other things).
- Supporting modular documents within XXE has been implemented for
a *single reason*: one day, a long time ago, a user complained: "OK,
I've created two chapters using XXE. Now, how do I include these in a
book?". This user, who used XXE naively, was stuck and it was our fault.
---
PS: * Jan: your chapter is not ``managed'' because it has been included
as an entity. It probably starts with a <!DOCTYPE> or a comment. It
would almost certainly be ``managed'' by XXE if it were included as an
XInclude.
This means that if you use XXE to author your XML documents from scratch
(e.g. if you are a beginner), you cannot have problems such as the one
reported in the attached screenshot.
* Fabrice: you don't need to switch constantly to the boiler plate
document. If you have already pasted a reference to the "company name"
in your document, you can copy the reference directly from there
(normally: using Ctrl-Shift-C).
Jan Nielsen wrote:
> First of all - thank you for a very nice, feature rich, highly
> configurable and quite user friendly XML-editor that brings XML-editing
> within reach of people (such as myself) who are not addicted to the
> press-five-keys-simultaneously nightmares of Emacs :-)
>
> From browsing your home page I've noticed that you seem quite reluctant
> to increase the number of "managed entity references" - so I'm not going
> to ask you to do that. But you might consider giving your users an
> option to preserve references to unmanaged entities unchanged - simply
> giving the user the option to preserve unmanaged entity references
> unexpanded. To my judgement (which is probably not very reliable due to
> my lack of knowledge of the XXE source and structure) the change should
> not be too difficult or time consuming to implement. The only downside
> would be compromising the 'WYSIAWYG' nature of XXE.
>
> I write documentation in DocBook format (but unfortunately I can't use
> XXE due to its expansion of unmanaged entity references). To ensure
> consistent representation of product names and other terms relevant to a
> specific document I normally use local entity references (mostly CDATA)
> declared in the master document's DOCTYPE element. These entity
> references expand and work fine within the master document - but as
> correctly documented by you such entities are not managed when
> referenced within sub-documents (chapters/sections referenced from the
> master document as external SYSTEM entities).
>
> When the first entity reference is encountered in the sub-document (I
> suppose) XXE warns (if configured to do so) about the loss of physical
> structure that will be the consequence of continuing the editing session
> (ie. if you save your work afterwards :-)
Fabrice Talbot wrote:
> It would be a fantastic feature if the above dialog offered an option to
> 'Preserve unmanaged entity references in referenced documents
> unchanged'. That would allow users to edit the modular document
> without destroying its structure. The only downside would be the
> presence of unexpanded entity references in the referenced document. But
> the unmanaged references would be preserved to the benefit of other
> XML/XSLT-processors that might be used for processing the modular
> document at a later stage.
>
> I hope my explanation and suggestion for a 'workaround' is
> understandable. Otherwise please don't don't hesitate to contact me.
> Hopefully you will consider the idea which I hope is in fact as easy to
> implement as I think it is.
>
> Thank you for your cooperation - and thank you again for an XML-editor
> that makes DocBook editing an option to people who are not key members
> of the Norman Walsh nerd community.
> > 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.
