Re: What to do given both SYSTEM and PUBLIC?

At 20:11 11/02/97 -0800, Joe English wrote:
>If and when the URN group and/or SGML Open and/or the W3C SGML ERB
>hammers out the details of how to do automatic FPI/URN resolution,
>it would do an indirect PUBLIC ID -> SYSTEM ID mapping based on whatever
>strategy they/we finally come up with.  (But quite frankly, I don't
>expect to see this happening in my lifetime.)

This is pretty much what I always wanted to do for publicly-available
DTDs, and I'm wondering if the introduction of XML might be the right
time to revive it. What I was looking at was a simple repository,
mirrored wherever people wanted, running httpd and ftpd, plus any
other useful schemes (gopher? :-) and serving up DTDs on request by
following the only standard mapping I have ever seen used in real life
to any large extent:

You want:     -//Foo, Inc//DTD Wondrous Document Type//EN

You request   http://wherever.org/Foo._Inc/DTD/Wondrous_Document_Type

ie the algorithmic resolution used by sgmls, psgml, and others. You
can fiddle around with a /registered and /unregistered prefix, perhaps,
and obviously /language subdirectories, and perhaps an implicit file
type, but the objective is a simple unambiguous 1:1 mapping to handle
the 99.9% majority of cases. And a mechanism for POs to submit new
DTDs. Then browsers in need of a DTD just do the relevant translate
on the FPI and hit the closest server up for the file.

Or is this just too easy and I've missed something major?

///Peter

Received on Monday, 17 February 1997 03:22:27 UTC