online SGML catalog registry

I'd like people's opinions about an idea I had recently: an online public 
identifier to URL mapping registry.

I thought www-html would be the best place to initially mention the idea.

Essentially the registry would do for SGML catalogs what DNS did for host 
tables. Root servers would contain lists of public text owners with 
mappings to that owner's catalogue. For example, the root servers would 
know where to go to find public text owned by IETF. The IETF would then 
have a server that would do a mapping from DTD HTML 2.0 or whatever to a 
URL that contained the public text.

The results could be returned to the querying browser which would treat the 
URL as a system identifier (like Panorama and nsgmls).

The relationship between this scheme and ISO 9070 would of course need to 
be discussed.

What do people think?

James K. Tauber <jtauber@ucs.uwa.edu.au>
Programmer and CWIS Officer
University Computing Services
University of Western Australia

Received on Thursday, 21 December 1995 03:49:13 UTC