> I kept wondering how something so simple could use such convoluted terms.
> An entity to me was something in Entity Relationship modeling. A file was
> something you included. A compiland (Pascal) was something you imported -
> or a package in Java.
What is your point: there should only ever be one name for anything, and
it should be the same name that you use? I know COBOL people who get upset
that SGML uses "attribute" and "element" so incorrectly. Actually, maybe
you do have a point: maybe standards should have an explicit note about
terms that have multiple uses in the wild (ISO standards all have a terms
and definitions section for this purpose.)
That entities are not what we would expect is not a compelling reason for
not having them, is it? (Indeed, the failure of XInclude may show that the
entity mechanism was in fact pretty practical and could be usefully
revived.)
> Also the name Extensible Markup Language is a misnomer. XML is not a
> language but a general meta grammar for creating and number of
> "languages".
Well, it certainly is a language in CS terms, because a formal language is
just syntactic, and XML certainly is a grammar.
Cheers
Rick
