Re: Public IDs for notations in XML

At 8:33 PM 12/11/96, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:

Good suggestion. A few quibbles below (basically lose PUBLIC on NOTATION,
FSI on SYSTEM):

>Proposed:
>
>Notation declarations consist of a notation name followed by an external
>identifier.  The external identifier consists of either the keyword
>"SYSTEM" followed by a literal containing a MIME type specification or the
>keyword "PUBLIC" followed by a literal containing a public identifier
>followed by a literal containing a MIME type specification.
>
>The MIME type specification could either be just a MIME type name, i.e.,
>"image/jpeg" (or mime type followed by parameters) or it could,
>potentially, be an SGML formal system identifier with a storage manager of
>MIMETYPE: "<mimetype>image/jpeg".

Since we made the broken decision on SYTEM IDs we should preserve the
brokenness on Notations -- FSI syntax should not be allowed one place and
not the other. I think this good idea should be deep-sixed for
compatibility with other SYSTEM IDs.

>If XML does not specify a public identifier resolution mechanism then it
>would not be allowed to have a public identifier without a corresponding
>MIME type.  If there is such a mechanism, then it would be possible,
>potentially, to do the mapping to MIME types there.

>One reason for allowing the public identifier for notations without a
>resolution mechanism is to make the correlation between existing notations
>used in SGML documents and the MIME types used for Internet delivery
>clearer, especially to those who already have SGML documents.  Obviously,
>if you are coming from HTML and only ever thought about MIME types, you
>don't necessarily need or want a public ID and don't need to specify one.

I could live with this, but given the extensibility of mime-types (the "x-"
prefix), and the relative paucity of well-known PUBLIC notation names in
the SGML world, I'm inclined to drop PUBLIC identifiers altogether for
NOTATION.

   -- David

I am not a number. I am an undefined character.
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Thursday, 12 December 1996 12:51:38 UTC