On Feb 18, 2008, at 12:27 PM, Jim Melton wrote:
> Maybe I and my fellow editors of W3C and ISO specs are 'way out of
> the norm, but we use the internal DTD subset very extensively. In
> fairness, I admit that we use it (almost?) exclusively for ENTITY
> declarations.
ENTITY declarations are reasonably sane in the publishing-technology
context (although less useful in practice than the theory of SGML
held), and XML was invented by by a bunch of publishing-tech geeks.
In the world of wire protocols, Entities are actively pernious; among
other things, they open the door to the billion-laughs attack. You
really don't want a general-purpose recursive macro processor running
over high-volume protocol traffic.
-Tim
