Do not use entities: Part III

Answered by: Eliot Kimber Last Updated: 2006-09-14

=Question by N.N.=

I'm really intrigued by your suggestions for removing all entities. We've struggled with entities for years and will soon be moving to a CMS where we'd like to use a new approach.

Can you give us an example of how authors would use your variable definitions in a document? Our authors are used to seeing just the text entity resolution and would probably balk at anything less than that. Do you implement some sort of ACL solution that shows just the value of the tag when it's used?

=Eliot Kimber answered=

Yes, it's pretty easy to implement an ACL function that can reflect the variable value as generated text for the variable reference element (requires using a function call in your FOSI (if you're using FOSIs for screen formatting).

It wasn't hard before but with Arbortext's XPath support in the later versions it's even easier to implement.

It would also be relatively easy to provide a special-purpose UI for both creating and selecting variables, i.e., one that is comparable to the built-in entity editing dialogs.