Re: What to do given both SYSTEM and PUBLIC?

Joe English wrote
[...]
> (If the software does not know how to automatically resolve
> PUBLIC ID's -- which I suspect most software will not, since
> _nobody_ is sure how to do this yet -- . . .
[...]
> Such systems will naturally have to be very good
> at automatically resolving PUBLIC IDs, which will be
> tricky, since nobody knows how to do this at all yet.

This puzzles me a bit. Emacs psgml-mode resolves FPIs faultlessly and I've
been using that method increasingly over the last year. For software that
doesn't support it, but uses socats, I have entries for the FPIs.

Can someone who knows more about the background say why resolving

  "-//Foo, Inc//DTD Wonderful Document Type//EN"

into

   /usr/local/lib/sgml/Foo,_Inc/DTD/Wonderful_Document_Type

is A Bad Thing, as it seems most people decry it (leave aside the Win3.x
and VM/SP users who don't have access to long filenames, as those systems
clearly have a problem, and leave aside the problem of write access to
/usr/local/lib/sgml, as that part of the filetree is parameterizable).

///Peter
-- 
> to discover 1000s of internal "homepages" that grew overnight
> like magic mushrooms on a rich motherlode of corporate horseshit.
                          Copyright 1996, IBM.  All Rights Reserved

Received on Wednesday, 19 February 1997 16:25:55 UTC