XHTML Working Draft--URLs for system ids of char entity decls

In the latest XHTML DTDs [1], the external entity declarations used to
reference the "Character mnemonic entities", e.g.:

<!ENTITY % HTMLlat1 PUBLIC
   "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin1//EN//HTML"
   "HTMLlat1x.ent">
%HTMLlat1;

have relative system identifiers (e.g., "HTMLlat1x.ent").

While this usually works if the processor knows how to canonicalize
relative paths properly and the desired files are in the proper location
relative to the DTD file, this seems unnecessarily fragile for such an
important DTD.  Given that the WWW is pretty much based on URLs for
accessing things, it seems that making these absolute, e.g.:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/DTD/HTMLlat1x.ent

might make sense.  This is, after all, from where the authoritative
copies must be gotten in the first place. 

paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd etc.

Received on Monday, 22 March 1999 18:24:59 UTC