On 3/3/2012 1:29, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Why would you want three different standard names for the same character?

What's the chinese word for "quotation mark"? For that matter, why would you 
even want a "name" for a character, unless your text editor is too lame to 
actually store the character? Leap-frog into the 21st century and start 
using Windows Notepad to edit your text or something.

> Well, for that matter, you can just type the Unicode code number directly.
> (This at least works with all operating systems and text editors, doesn't
> break every five minutes, etc.) It's just that memorising large quantities
> of code numbers isn't exactly trivial.

Right. So you're complaining that XML is broken because your text editor 
can't handle Unicode?  Just type the unicode characters directly into the 
text document, without using any code numbers.

> Well, if it were possible for one DTD to import several others, then it
> could be pretty easy... As it is, constructing even one DTD is so insanely
> hard that only the professionals can do it.

... says the man who programs in Haskell. ;-)

You don't really have to *import* DTDs. You can pretty much just concatenate 
them, as long as there aren't conflicting definitions, and fix up only the 
places where they actually interact. I mean, if you have some java-specific 
XML (say, a build system), and you want to embed SVG into that (say, to 
define the splash screen for the completed program), your build system is 
going to have to understand how to interpret SVG.

> What, a combinatorial explosion of DTDs for every possible combination of
> XML applications that you might ever want to combine? No, that's just silly.

Why not? You get a combinatorial explosion of types in your computer 
programs for every new program you write.

Generally, your XML processor has to understand the combination you're using 
anyway, so it's not really obvious there's a problem here. It's not like 
you're going to combine SEP and XHTML in one program and expect to not do 
more work than frobbing around the DTD.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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