I think you may be shortchanging Martin's talk on ISO DSRL!

In fact, it does solve at least one completely pressing problem that prevents some publishing people moving beyond DTDs: it provides mappings for undeclared entities, so that people can author with ISO character references if they want to and produce well-formed XML.

It does this in the context of a general name and value mapping tool, which should be implementable on top of XSLT 2.

Apologies. It wasn't my intent to shortchange Martin. Perhaps the polemic style of the presentation distracted me. I don't recall mention of mapping undeclared entities. I'll take a closer look at DSRL.

Yeah, DiSRuLe itself does provide entity remapping, but an implementation won't be able to actually deliver unless it relies on an XML parser that reliably passes information about undefined entities to the application.

In particular, SAX doesn't provide any way at all to cope with undefined entity references in attribute values, since an attribute value is a string, not a structured object.