Alternatives to entities

XML inherited all of the entity-related features described above from the older SGML standard. In part, the entity concept was retained simply for backward compatibility with this standard, and was already considered by many to be an overly engineered approach to solving some of the problems introduced above. In particular, the separation of the declaration from the reference is often considered to be difficult to manage. Recently, alternative approaches have emerged to solve many of the issues handled by entities and discussed above.

Character referencing

As more operating systems and software applications become Unicode-sensitive, the need for entities to represent unusual characters will finally begin to diminish (see Chapter 29).

XML fragment inclusions

The proposed XML Include standard (see Chapter 12) offers a simpler, more direct way to call-in XML document fragments, and if the merging of data is only required to be a transitory visual effect for on-line viewing of narrative text, then the proposed XLink 'embed' feature (see Chapter 27) may also be considered.

Binary object inclusions

Again, XLink 'embed' feature (see Chapter 27) may be considered as an alternative mechanism for presenting referenced binary data to users, but in this case the embedding is no more transitory than the entity approach.