Re: B.9 Formal system, public identifiers?

>B.9 Should XML require system and public identifiers to be FORMAL
>(13.5)?

For XML 1.0, we need to keep things as simple as possible.  The simplest
solution is:

- No public identifiers, formal or otherwise.

- System identifiers must be URLs.

I don't think it's part of our job in this WG to try and solve the WWW's
naming/addressing problems.  The mechanism that the WWW currently uses for
identifying entities is URLs.   We should simply adopt that into XML.

If we incorporate public identifiers, we would need to define a mechanism
for resolving them to URLs. There is not time to do that before November.
They can always be added in XML 1.1.

I don't think formal system identifiers buy us any functionality that we
have to have in XML 1.0.  They can be added in a future version; this would
be backwards compatible since any legal formal system identifier is not a
legal URL.

James

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 1996 10:04:09 UTC