Re: XML catalog draft

Terry wrote:
> Just a note:  I had argued for URNs as PIs, on the inarticulate
> assumptions that only FPIs would be used as PIs and that PIs would
> always be resolved as URNs.  Paul has taken a different approach
> (more articulately).

I think that it would be better to specify that URNs be used (which I
would support) than FPIs (which I do not support), as there is still no
resolution mechanism that will scale up to millions of FPIs even
proposed, let alone working, as far as I can see.  ISO can mandate the
use of things that don't exist and might never work, but that doesn't
mean we can, and if you need a W3C Recommendation and/or an RFC, that
won't cut any ice.  (why do people need to cut ice?  it comes in cubes)

> Currently, I think that an SGML Open catalogue could be expressed
> as a set of ilinks, and that doing so would reduce the number of 
> syntaxes required for implementation (this is a different issue
> from FPIs and URNs and PIs).
Yes, I agree.  It is very sad that SGML OPEN used a non-SGML syntax
because it was easier to implement and get people to agree on and to
have a common working inplementation than an SGML file.

>  Either way, some means of associating
> catalogues or ilinksets with documents is required.  
Clearly -- otherwise we haven't solved the problem, but only made it
more complicated.  A way of getting from instance to catalog is needed.

I will say right now that we spent a lot of effort on this topic for
SoftQuad Panorama, and didn't get it right in the 1st release.

It's still not perfect, but we have backward compatibility issues.
Let's do it right for XML.

Lee

Received on Friday, 7 February 1997 12:28:08 UTC