Re: The furore over PUBLIC

[Len Bullard:]

| What about the case where the writer only wants to identify the type
| and not the instance?  They must point to the registry/process where
| the type is resolved to an instance.

My intuition is telling me that there is some helpful distinction to
be made here between an FPI that's needed to identify which DTD a
document is supposed to conform to and a generic public identifier
whose purpose is to fetch external entities, but I haven't been
successful yet in getting a grip on it.

Surely what we're thinking of when we specify a version of the DocBook
DTD is only in the last resort an actual trip to the Davenport site to
get a copy, but that always has to be the fallthrough or the citation
is ultimately meaningless.

| I agree that a public id looks like a comment until one notes it is a
| formal comment with a legal requirement to be a registered type.

No, there's no legal requirement inherent in "-//Davenport//DTD
DocBook V2.4//EN".  And no formal registration with an authority,
either.  I think that you're on to something, but that's not it.

| Using it without such registration makes it a less powerful formality.
| Such formal registration also has domains; the registry server is the
| domain server.  A lookup table is a lookup table is a lookup table, so
| I don't understand the problem here.  It looks like another RFC for a
| resolution service and if so, then those that want it have to
| implement it to use it.  Duh!

The people who have to implement it are the browser vendors.  They're
not buying a pig in a poke, and I can't say that I blame them.

Jon

Received on Sunday, 30 March 1997 17:05:36 UTC