- From: Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>
- Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 12:28:03 -0500
- To: "Curt Arnold" <carnold@houston.rr.com>, <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- Cc: <www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org>
At 11:45 2000 07 14 -0500, Curt Arnold wrote: >Philosophically, I think the scoping statement betrays the objective of XML >Base. XML Base's motivation was to separate resolution of relative URI's >from the physical location of the resource. But the scoping rule, makes the >physical structure of the XML document an issue in interpretation. Others have argued similarly--you are certainly not alone, and your position is not unreasonable. However, I would argue that it is not the case that "XML Base's motivation was to separate resolution of relative URI's from the physical location of the resource." Rather, I like to think of XML Base as merely providing for XML resources what RFC 2396 [1] calls the "Base URI within Document Content" (see Section 5.1.1). As 2396 says in that section: It is beyond the scope of this document to specify how, for each media type, the base URI can be embedded. It is assumed that user agents manipulating such media types will be able to obtain the appropriate syntax from that media type's specification. XML Base is precisely the definition of how to embed the base URI in a resource of type XML, and that's all. The rest of section 5.1 of 2396 is all about the various levels of "Establishing a Base URI", and the level described in section 5.1.3 is "Base URI from the Retrieval URI" which, as the XML Core WG and most existing implementations interpret it, implies precisely the scoping of base URI to the current entity. Furthermore, the XML 1.0 spec says: Unless otherwise provided by information outside the scope of this specification (e.g. a special XML element type defined by a particular DTD, or a processing instruction defined by a particular application specification), relative URIs are relative to the location of the resource within which the entity declaration occurs. A URI might thus be relative to the document entity, to the entity containing the external DTD subset, or to some other external parameter entity. [2] So it's not XML Base that has defined the scoping, it's RFC 2396 and XML. paul [1] ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-external-ent
Received on Friday, 14 July 2000 13:28:08 UTC