Catalogs and XInclude

Has any thought been given to how XML catalogs 
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html> do or 
do not interact with XInclusion? Specifically should/should 
not/may/must? the catalog be consulted when figuring out where to load a 
document referenced by an xinclude:include element?

Right now I'm trying to add basic catalog support to my XIncluder engine 
for Java. So far, in practice, this just affects the DTD, but since it's 
implemented through a SAX EntityResolver it could potentially affect 
anything loaded by the parser; that is, anything loaded when 
parse="xml". For consistency, you might want the same catalog used when 
parse="text"? Or would you? I've just stumbled across this issue, and 
I'm not at all sure what's appropriate here.

Catalogs are part of the parsing process. Among other things they tell 
you where to find which DTDs. Thus, they can't really be cleanly layered 
as a separate process that can occur either before or after XInclusion. 
This distinguishes them from, for example, XSLT transformation.

Guidance from the specification on this point would be useful.


--
Elliotte Rusty Harold

Received on Sunday, 9 March 2003 10:48:58 UTC