Some queries on the XML Catalogs spec

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

(You certainly make it hard to post comments here!  The address in the
spec is wrong - is has an "s" on the end of comment - and you can't
subscribe in the way it describes.)


I'm implementing the XML Catalogs spec for RXP, working from the 21
Feb 2003 draft, and I have a few queries:

Is the system identifier input to the resolver the system identifier
as it appears in the document, or the result of absolutizing that?
Presumably the latter, but it doesn't seem to say that in section 7.1.

Step 3 of 7.1.2 does not mention that the rewriteSystem entry with the
longest systemIdStartString is the only one used.  This is stated in
6.5.5, but it should be explicit in the description of the algorithm.

Section 6.3 does not explicitly say whether the hex digits in a
%-escape inserted during normalization must be in upper or lower case,
though the use of %HH might be taken to mean upper case.  Since there
is no mention of these being matched case-insensitively, it is
important which are used.

Is there a recommended way to handle external identifiers when parsing
catalog files themselves?  Obviously they cannot be looked up in the
catalog.  Is it reasonable to have a copy of catalog.dtd built-in to
the parser and special-case its system and public identifiers?

-- Richard