Re: Proposal for XML syntax for catalogs

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com> was heard to say:
| While I don't feel strongly, if we are going to "standardize"
| on "uri" for the righthand side, I don't see why we don't also
| do that in the case of delegate and catalog.

My thought was that, while the 'uri' of a public or system entry can
point to any sort of resource that's appropriate, the right hand side
of delegate and catalog entries, while technically a URI, is also
supposed to be an XML Catalog. So let's call it that.

| 1.  use some fairly semantic-free name such as <group> or <div>
|     or <scope> for the scoping tag.  We can either:
[...]
| 2.  Finesse both this scope-element issue and the import issue
|     by defining the <catalog> element to have both functions.

I prefer the second. I didn't consider giving the element different
semantics depending on whether or not it had an attribute partly
because there's no way to express those semantics in either XML Schema
or DTDs (and not in RELAX either, I don't think).

| >  <delegate idPrefix="urn:oasis:member:ndw:"
| >            catalog="http://nwalsh.com/catalog"/>
| 
| I've got a problem here--same one as I've expressed several times.
| URN's where, used as what, in what context?  Public IDs or System IDs?

Oh, barf. You're right. Hmm. I only want this for system or public
identifiers, so may be we can do this:

  <delegate systemIdPrefix="xxx" publicIdPrefix="yyy" catalog="zzz"/>

| TR9401 defines Delegate semantics in terms of public identifiers.
| As I've said before, if you also want to be able to delegate for
| system ids, then we should have both delegatePublic and delegateSystem
| entry types.  Then, the "lefthand side" for the former would be
| publicId and for the latter systemId, and both would work fine
| for URNs.

What Paul said.

| Implementing my second suggestion with regard to scoping and
| the one above for delegate (and using "uri" for all rhs attribute
| names), I'd rewrite Norm's example as follows:
| 
| <catalog override="yes">
|   <public publicId="xxx" uri="yyy"/>
|   <system systemId="xxx" uri="yyy"/>
|   <catalog override="no" xml:base="absURI">
|     <delegatePublic publicId="xxx" uri="yyy"/>
|     <public publicId="zzz" uri="yyy"/>
|   </catalog>
|   <catalog uri="yyy"/>
| </catalog>

I want to keep the attribute name 'catalog' for the places where we're
pointing to catalogs. And I prefer my solution to the delegate
problem. Otherwise, I agree :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@East.Sun.COM | "I" before "E" except after "C": simple,
XML Technology Center     | concise and efficeint.
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    |