Re: Creating Catalog of W3C's XML Schemata

/ Ted Guild <ted@w3.org> was heard to say:
| utilities (eg [7]).  This topic came up as part of a recent Staff
| Project Review where Tim suggested the question of whether or not to
| make a catalog available of W3C's various DTD/schemata should be
| brought to the TAG to decide.  The Systems and Communications Teams
| would discuss further how to carry it out should the decision be
| affirmative.

I'm a big fan of catalogs, as I'm sure many of you know. I think it
would be great if the W3C encouraged tool vendors to make use of XML
Catalogs[1] to reduce the burden on www.w3.org.

Unfortunately, just creating a catalog file at w3.org won't help
reduce traffic. What you really need is to get the catalogs
distributed as part of the OS or toolchain.

| W3C could also work to persuade various Operating System providers to
| make libxml or a similar XML Catalog model a default part of their OS
| in a defined location (system environment variable or predefined OS
| specific default) for other XML processing software and libraries to
| reference.  Also they should have reasonably frequent updates part of
| their overall OS' automated update strategy and define policies
| whether libraries and utilities are able to update or contribute to
| the catalog as well, treating it like a caching catalog.  Whether
| static and only updated routinely by OS maintainers or the online
| resources' http headers are more regularly checked to fetch newer
| versions the catalog could be basically considered a http cache from
| the architectural point of view.

It seems to me that there's a continuum here between, on the easy end,
the W3C publishes a .zip file that contains a set of stable schemas
and a catalog file that maps them and, on the hard end, getting
catalog support cooked into the OS release model.

Many tools support catalogs already (most Java-based XML parsers,
libxml, and probably others). Simply getting them installed on more
desktops and getting the tools to use them would help.

It's not immediately obvious what role the TAG has in this process, but
I'm certainly happy to lend my support.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14809/xml-catalogs.html

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | One's never alone with a rubber duck.
http://nwalsh.com/            |