- From: Thompson, Bryan B. <BRYAN.B.THOMPSON@saic.com>
- Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 10:16:39 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org
- Cc: "Bebee, Bradley R." <bebeeb@US-McLean.mail.saic.com>, Guy.A.Lukes@frb.gov
I just noticed that the XML 1.0 Recommendation (Second edition) does not state a requirement that the public identifier in a DOCTYPE declaration must be a URN, e.g.: -- snip from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#NT-ExternalID -- [Definition: In addition to a system identifier, an external identifier may include a public identifier.] An XML processor attempting to retrieve the entity's content may use the public identifier to try to generate an alternative URI reference. If the processor is unable to do so, it must use the URI reference specified in the system literal. Before a match is attempted, all strings of white space in the public identifier must be normalized to single space characters (#x20), and leading and trailing white space must be removed. -- end snip -- Further, based on RFC2396, a valid URN has a scheme "urn:" but the public identifier is often written without any scheme, e.g.: "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN" So it is pretty clear that the public identifier is not a URN per RFC2396. At the same time, it is being used "as if" it were a universal resource name and the XML processor is encouraged to identify a URI that may be used address the XML grammar declared by the DOCTYPE declaration. It seems to me that there should be some clarification here. Appologies if this has been covered elsewhere already. Thanks, -bryan Bryan Thompson Systems Architect Hicks & Associates, Inc. 3811 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 850 Arlington, VA 22203 +1 703-469-3409 (o) +1 202-285-5099 (c) thompsonbry@saic.com
Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2003 10:16:50 UTC