- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 23 Oct 96 09:54:51 BST
- To: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
- Cc: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
Well, I HAVE been listening, and although a bit impatient with the testiness on both sides from time to time, think there is a real point on both sides, and that by simply proceeding (and implicitly ignoring David and Gavin) the ERB would be making a technical as well as a strategic error. In particular, I think Tim is at least misleading to say 'the smokescreen about "it's the entity not the file" is just that'. David's observation that "[Since] SGML has the general notion of an entity manager, the notion of an entity header on the storage object fits right into the SGML model" seems to me to be exactly right. Step back a minute and think what you expect the command line argument to a Unix-based XML tool to be -- a filename? a filename or a URL? a filename or a URL or an FPI? Well obviously, it's going to be, implicitly or explicitly, just as for SP-based applications already, an SGML Open entity specifier, that is, any of the above. Which means that rudimentary entity access management is a necessary part of any XML application, and for entities of type OSFILE that means finding the header information on the front thereof. Is that really so bad? ht
Received on Wednesday, 23 October 1996 04:55:01 UTC