[help-texinfo] Re: texinfo.xsl not working

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

>     You said you'd like to have an encoding attribute, I say that this
>     is not necessary because the default encoding (according to the XML
>     specs) is UTF-8 anyway.
>
> My viewpoint, too.

By the way, there is an encoding specification if you set
@documentlanguage.

>     You said you want to get rid of entities, I say they don't hurt
>     since XML is an intermediate format.
>
> My viewpoint, too.  Thanks Torsten :).

You're welcome, however, Ralf is right that on the long run, we must
have only numbered entities in the output.  At the moment the named
entities are useful, but they will be a possible cause of trouble in
a production process as soon as the XML format is mature.

> In my view, the XML output should remain 7-bit (except for actual
> characters in the input file).

Excatly; this is the way to go.

> [...]
>
> Alper (and Ralf), I don't yet see that numeric entities have any
> particular advantage over the situation now,

Named entities must be defined somewhere, numeric ones needn't.

As far as I can see, the XML specifications says that every XML
parser, validating or not, must understand named entities in the
internal (=embedded) DTD.  But at the moment, we have an external
DTD, so some parsers may break (on the other hand, even my
non-validating parsers parse external entity definitions).
Additionally, I agree with Ralf that making the parser find an
external DTD can become cumbersome.

To make a long story short, my personal point of view is to leave it
as it is.  The XML format needs some work, and the flexibility of an
external DTD is an advantage at this stage.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus