General Entity


These are variables which can be substituted within the document instance. They can be defined but NOT substituted in the DTD (use parameter entities). They are denoted by somestring which is substituted when encountered later. They are a useful way of (a) providing symbolic filenames in the document instance (i.e, 'INCLUDEing' other files) and (b) providing string substitution in the document instance (e.g. alpha; can be looked up in the entity sets and substituted by a greek alpha (if we have one!)