[claudius]

> loading external entities pointed in an XML automatically? what kind of joke is that?

Your browser does much the same when parsing (X)HTML. LaTeX naturally includes ‘external’ resources when building an output file. There are tons of examples like that, loading external entities per se is not wrong, it’s mostly just wrong under these specific circumstances.

[nateabele]

I think the important difference here is that with browsers, the behavior is well-known and well-understood, there are a very small number of them, and you're unlikely to run one in a production environment -- barring, say, something like PhantomJS, which still has all the foregoing in its favor.

This compared to XML parsers, for which there are often multiple per language, each of which may be implemented to wildly different levels of sophistication re: security.

[claudius]

My point was that it is not an unreasonable thing to have some sort of #include directive in a data format, and certainly not in a markup language.

The problem here was the same as in the rest of the software industry: programmers are far from ‘engineers’ in their desire to understand their tools, use the right tools and build bug-free code. Instead, most people hack for fun with tools they hardly understand and then somehow manage to complain if they shoot off their feet while doing so.

Hacking for fun and shooting off extremities is of course perfectly fine, but the blame for the latter lies in the programmer (and possibly their education), not the tools.