The rootallchildref setting, causes all entity declarations to be written in the root document's subset, and declarations for entities referenced immediately with a child to be written in the subset of each child. This produces valid SGML in that the root document contains declarations for all entities of the document tree, and additionally writes all entity declarations currently referenced by a file entity in a special comment subset at the front of the file entity. That can be useful if the file entities are edited standalone (that is, edited directly instead of being edited by being opened from the parent document).

This setting balances the need for standalone entity editing with the need for smaller entities. If it is not necessary to be able to access all entities while editing standalone, the smaller entity size, both when stored and in memory, makes this setting preferable to rootallchildall.

This option is the default.