Re: ERB discussion of public identifiers

   On the other hand, I'm surprised that Paul says that the ordering issue is
   contentious. If the reader has overridden a public identifier, shouldn't
   that always take precedence over the author's system id, from his machine??
   What is the counter argument?

I think it's more along the lines that the SYSTEM identifier is not
seen as an override by authors, but as a failsafe because of the
reputed poor resolution of FPIs. 

It took me weeks to work out how they resolved, when I first
encountered them, and they still won't work on some systems (W95 won't
allow colon in long filenames; some users can't get write access to
the right directory to install them :-), so I feel some sympathy for
users who consign them to resource-broker hell and stick to SYSTEM
identifiers. If we include PUBLIC identifiers, the resolution must be
documented and must work.

Much more useful would be a URL-style resolution that would try a
fully-qualified URL, but also strip down to the directories and
filename and try the local disk as well (someone mentioned the
intranet problem), but that's outside the scope of the current
discussion.

///Peter

Received on Sunday, 15 December 1996 17:14:06 UTC