Re: Question about entities in Mallard

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 18:47 -0600, Jim Campbell wrote:

> Based on what Shaun provided, I was able to get the following to work:
> 
> 
> <!DOCTYPE page [
> <!ENTITY % entities-xfce SYSTEM "../../doc-libs/entities-xfce.ent">
> %entities-xfce;
> <!ENTITY % entities-xfce-app SYSTEM
> "../../doc-libs/entities-xfce-app.ent">
> %entities-xfce-app;
> ]>
> 
> 
> <page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/";
>       type="topic"
>       id="introduction">
> 
> 
> . . . 
> 
> 
> -----------
> As for now, I have all of my actual documentation in a "docs" folder,
> but have a separate doc-libs and images folder, too.  Yelp properly
> displays both the external entities and the images that I placed in a
> folder separate from the documents.
> 
> 
> This is the desired behavior for me, but I wanted to check in and make
> sure that I'm not breaking any Mallard rules,

Not at all.  This is all standard (if advanced) XML stuff.
I don't discuss any of this in the Mallard spec in part
because it's not Mallard-specific, and in part because I
don't want to confuse people.

>  or if any of what I've done actually only works because I have some
> docbook files installed on my system.

You haven't directly done anything DocBook-specific, but
I don't know what's in those entity files you reference.
If those are including DocBook files, then you've got a
DocBook dependency.  Otherwise, no.

What you might consider doing is installing these files
on the system somewhere and registering them with the
system-wide XML catalog.  Then you could reference them
with a canonical URI and have them automatically looked]
up by libxml2.
> 
The only caveat is that Yelp passes XML_PARSE_NONET to
libxml2, which means it won't hit the network to resolve
entity references.  So if you use a canonical http URI,
and you don't have a system-installed file registered
with the XML catalog, your entities won't be resolved.

--
Shaun