Re: defaulting namespace attributes with relative URI references

At 07:22 PM 6/2/00 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
>If you decide that the DTDs base URI should be used (somehow) then
>you have the fun deciding what is the base URI is for a DTD found
>via a PUBLIC identifier. (Obviously any given application knows
>which copy of the DTD it used, but it means the namespaces used in the
>document depend on the application used to query the document, which
>is a bit odd.) Or perhaps you would use the base uri from the system
>identifier, even if the dtd actually read was located using the public
>id, but that is probably against some axiom or other.

I hadn't even reached the possibility of a PUBLIC identifier yet, but that
certainly raises the stakes.

I was trying to come up with a complex scenario where this was plausible,
and suspect it might well be applicable to XHTML 1.1 modularization and
driver files.  Simultaneously the most complex applications of DTDs
undertaken by the W3C and perhaps the most elegant, I suspect XHTML 1.1
could well be fertile ground for exactly these types of problems.  

With modules, determining a base URI could be even more complex, as the DTD
as a whole might not share a common base URI.  Also, these are the kinds of
cases where I think developers might plausibly choose (if not warned
otherwise) to deploy relative URIs in namespace attribute default values.

Wow.  Pretty cool.  So how do we make all this work without battling axioms
or people?

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Friday, 2 June 2000 14:44:15 UTC