[jdom-interest] Entity resolving - design problem

[Bernd Eggink]

Please regard the follwing situation: A client software reads an XML
file into a JDOM Document, modifies it via a GUI, saves it back to an
XML file, and additionally generates HTML files from it. If the client
is satisfied with the result, he uploads the modified XML file to a
servlet container. There it is again parsed and transformed into HTML.

The problem is that the XML source may contain <img> tags, whose "src"
attributes must point to different locations depending on whether the
files lay on the client or on the server. The name is the same, but
the directories differ. My first idea was to use an entity for the
directory, like
    
    <img src="&gifdir;/blah.gif">

and supply different DTDs for the client and the server, containing
different values for gifdir. However, this doesn't work because
the client parser already resolves the entities, so its XML output
doesn't contain entity references anymore.

My next idea was to treat the <img> tag specially, prefixing its "src"
attribute with different directory parts on client and server. This
works, but appears ugly and too specific. For example, JavaScript
statements like "document.blah.src=another.gif" would again have to be
treated specially.
 
The solution I'd like best is to exclude some specified entities from
expansion. Is this possible? (I guess not). Any other ideas how to
solve this problem?

Regards,
Bernd

-- 
Bernd Eggink
Regionales Rechenzentrum der Uni Hamburg
Bernd.Eggink at rrz.uni-hamburg.de
http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/RRZ/B.Eggink/