Re: RELAX NG and system entities

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 01:24:48 +0900
Michael Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> Matthew Burgess <[email protected]> writes:
> > 2) Has anyone used EDML?  How successful has that use been?  Is it, as
> > I 
> > think, applicable to our needs of sharing data between multiple XML 
> > documents?
> 
> I don't think there are any implementations of EDML. It's just a
> draft proposal. There are also other ideas floating around about

So far as I know, it's pretty much a dead letter.  The sort of support
that it would need seems unlikely to appear.

I'd support it, of course.  ;-)

> > The main concern I have is the explicit support it would 
> > seem to require from XML parsers.
> 
> Seems like it wouldn't require any support at all in existing
> parsers if you had a special tool for resolving entity refs --
> just run that and pipe the output to your validator or XSL engine.
> Making such a tool is easy. You could make one now to process EDML
> syntax or whatever syntax you wanted to use.
> 
> Hard part is getting everyone to agree on a standard syntax to use.

True enough.  EDML may not be best-suited for pre-processing in this
fashion, however.  One of its design goals was to provide fulfillment of
well-formedness requirements by using XML for definition.  This still
seems rather elegant to me, but it does mean that you kinda need to get
the parser guys to agree to it.  If you can't use the standard tools, then
the ability to leverage standard tools gets you no where.  No place to
stand, as it were.

Sorry.

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.
                -- Indigo Girls