XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Introduction

Some thesauri give entity as a synonym for 'element'. But XML entities are very different to XML elements. They are concerned with the physical components of a document, rather than its logical components. The entire XML document is an entity. Entities are not as simple as elements, since they are used for several distinct purposes. In fact, a number of the key features of the standard are supported by entities. They are used to:

• create escape-codes for significant markup characters

• provide a mechanism for representing characters that are not available from the keyboard, or in standard character sets

• divide long documents into smaller, more manageable chunks

• create re-usable components that can be shared by many documents

• include by ...