Re: Public Identifiers, and CATALOGS

>    HTTP 1.1 fixes the multiple connection problems of HTTP 1.0 and allows
>several commands to be bouncing down the wire at a time (which is very
>good). _but_ it is not a multiplexed connection -- one whole resource must
>be transmitted before the next one can be fetched. This means that once I
>start fetching the document, I can start fetching the stylesheet, and the
>catalog, but I can't use either of them until the document is all there.
>What we really want (if we are to use HTTP 1.1 effectively) is a way to
>fetch a "manifest" for the document, and then select and fetch the
>document, (one or more) stylesheets, and so forth, in whateever order makes
>most sense. In practice, probably style-sheet (if we don't already have
>it), DTD (if we need it, and don't already have it), document, then
>external entities. Now a CATALOG looks like a great nominee for the
>manifest. So much so, that I'm very tempted to say that we _should_ require
>catalogs, not for the PUBLIC->SYSTEM mapping, though that it a useful side
>effect, but so that we can require that the standard URL for a "document"
>may identifiy a CATALOG with a DOCUMENT entry, identifying where the XML
>parsing should begin.

This is the core concept behind the MIME-SGML proposal based on 
catalogs.

Received on Thursday, 3 April 1997 07:58:57 UTC