Re: Client-side-resolved Indirection

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996 12:35:15 -0500 Paul Prescod said:
> ... You've hit the nail on the head in a couple of respects. First,
>document *authors* should not care about the resolution mechanism of
>document *consumers*. They should be totally independant.

As an author or publisher, I don't care about the mechanics; I do
care, rather a lot, about ensuring (a) that the document consumer can
actually resolve entity references and (b) that when they do, they
get the right thing.  Specifying a method of resolving FPIs seems to
make those guarantees; specifying FPIs without a defined method of
resolution seems to make neither guarantee.  That's a level of
independence between publisher and reader which I am not prepared to
endorse.

>>To answer the question someone posed:  No, I, for one, did not use SGML
>>public identifiers before the advent of the SGML Open catalogue,
>
>Didn't you ever download documents that used these FPIs in it?
>
><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
>or
>"ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN"
>or
>"ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Greek Symbols//EN"
>or
>"ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Publishing//EN"

Not that I know of.  Version 3.2 of HTML did not exist before the advent
of SGML Open catalogues; the entity sets did, but I don't believe I ever
downloaded SGML documents from the Web at that time; when on occasion I
got SGML documents from other people, working with the DTD subset to
make my SGML systems find the entity sets was just part of the job of
getting the files to parse.

>I must admit that I had really expected TEILite (at least!) to have
>a public identifier, but you got me there, it doesn't. I guess
>everybody had better have their TEILite file named "teilite.dtd". I
>encourage you to create one.

Don't believe your eyes; TEI Lite has a public identifier and has, as
far as I can remember, always had one.  I could be wrong, of course.
Maybe it's only had one since Panorama became available and used the
SGML Open catalogue.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Monday, 2 December 1996 13:20:13 UTC