Inside XML

Creating External General Entities

Besides internal entities, entities can also be external, which means that you should provide a URI directing the XML processor to the entity. You can use references to external entities to embed those entities in your document. As we'll see near the end of this chapter, you can also indicate that an external entity should not be parsed, which means that you can associate binary data with a document (much like associating images with an HTML document).

External entities can be simple strings of text, they can be entire documents, or they can be sections of documents. All that matters is that when they are inserted into the document's content, the XML processor is satisfied that the document is well-formed and ...