Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Entity Declarations

Entities are simply a method of shorthand for including information in an XML document which is either repeated often or specialized characters.

For example, let's say that we were working on a set of legal documents, and we wanted to include a disclaimer in those documents, and we wanted to repeat it many times (at the top and bottom of each page, for example). We could insert the entire disclaimer word-for-word multiple times in the document, or we could use an entity.

When entities appear in an XML instance document, they look like this:

<element>&entity;</element> 

The ampersand & denotes that the text is an entity, and the semicolon ; denotes the end of the entity. The entity represents the name of the entity, as defined ...