Typically those chapters are included as entities in a book
file that does have a doctype and also has any doc-specific entities declared in
the doctype's internal subset. You then validate the book file and in doing so
validate all the files it pulls in as entity references. See DocBook, The
Definitive Guide for more information:
http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch02.html#ch02-physdiv
However, now there's another way to do the same thing in
which each part of the larger document does have its own doctype. See Bob
Stayton's book for a discussion of that:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ModularDoc.html
David
From: Fabrice (GMail)
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009
1:24 PM
To:
Subject:
[docbook-apps] Undeclared entity in Docbook chapters
Hi,
I noticed that some Docbook
projects have chapter XML files that reference entities not declared in the
chapter. The chapter will not validate when loaded in a XML Editor and raise
errors with most XML parsers. This is usually resolved at publish time: a book
XML file references those chapters with entity variables and includes entity
declaration (inline or with a link).
Can someone explain me the
benefits (or reasons) of this approach? Having non-validating XML files seems
to defy the purpose of using XML standards in the first
place…
What are the alternatives for
writers who want to expose and use entities in
chapters?
Thanks!
Fabrice
