Re: suggest validator prefer URI to FPI

* Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>> >I'm interested to know if others find the arguments in
>> >  http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-benefits
>> >persuasive or not; i.e. whether they agree with me that
>> >the markup validation service should prefer URIs to FPIs.
>>
>> Two rather unrelated questions. The section you cite discusses good
>> practise for "web agents" when providing resources, not whether XML
>> processors should prefer system identifiers over public identifiers
>> when resolving external entities.
>
>I think DanC's point was that since URIs are preferred to FPIs in the
>Web Architecture,

They are not as far as I can tell. If they are, the proper place to
discuss this would be the XML Core Working Group so they can write
this important bit of information into the XML 1.0 Recommendation.
Until that happens, SIs are not preferred to FPIs in any relevant way.

>Taking a practical example:
>- if the FPI and the System ID differs, it's probably a good idea to
>tell the user
>- if the FPI and the System ID differs, it's probably a good idea to use
>the System ID to check the document instead of the FPI, since that's
>what an agent that wouldn't know the FPI would do
>
>What would be the drawbacks in terms of user experiences/implementations
>against this approach?

That depends on how it would be determined whether FPI and SI "differ".
For example, my document is

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
    "/dtd/xhtml11">
  <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
  <head>
    <title>...</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>...</p>
  </body>
  </html>

It's like that so I can ssh to the server and run `xmlvalid` on the
entire file tree without need for external resources or a catalog
system. What would the Validator do exactly? If /dtd/xhtml11 is
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml11-20010531/DTD/xhtml11-flat.dtd
it would seem inappropriate to fetch additional 150KB document from
my server any time someone validates one of my documents, as it would
seem inappropriate to suggest that there is anything wrong with
my document. In order to avoid both, it would be neccessary to have a
list of "well-known" SIs and their FPI mappings and limited tests to
them; is that your suggestion?

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2004 23:27:17 UTC