Re: default name for the catalog

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 17:45 2001 04 29 -0700, Lauren Wood wrote:
>In part B of 9401, there is a system of default names of the catalog,
>which gives the implementation a way to bootstrap itself when finding
>the catalog. 
>
>I know some of you think of this as a packaging issue, which I don't; I
>simply want a way for an implementation to look for a file by default
>which it can treat as a catalog. If there is a package, this file could
>either be in it, with the default name, or not.

I assume the canonical idea here is something like was Issue B of TR9401
said:  look for a file of the name "catalog" (or whatever) in the same 
directory as you found the document instance.  But now that we have a PI 
that we can put into a document to point to a catalog, I'm not sure I see 
the need.

There seem to be two scenarios:

1.  There is some "document-side" catalog info.  Either the document
    creator wants to specify some catalog info, or there is some catalog
    info being associated with the document (e.g., there is a "catalog"
    file in the same directory as the document or there is some catalog
    info part in a multipart MIME message that also contains the document).

2.  The "system side" of things would like to specify some default
    catalog info for use when processing any document.  For example, it is
    convenient for an XML editor to have local copies of the XHTML and
    DocBook DTDs and the ISO entity reference declarations.

In scenario 1, I see no reason why the <?oasis-xml-catalog PI can't be
used to point accordingly.  In fact, I'd say that if a document doesn't
contain such a PI, it's precisely because the author doesn't want the
XML system to use any document-side catalog.  Looking for a file called
"catalog" could be irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst.  Suppose
you have many XML documents in a certain directory--what makes it reasonable
to assume that a single "catalog" file in that directory is relevant and
appropriate for all the documents?  What if I go to alter the catalog
because I want to redirect a certain identifier for document X, and then
you go to access document Y that happens to be in the same directory and
my change sends you somewhere unexpected to resolve an external entity?
If you really want to use the "catalog" file for a given document, just put
<?oasis-xml-catalog catalog="catalog"?> in your file, and you get the
behavior you want.  But at least you don't get any surprise behavior if
you don't have any PI or if you turn off use of the PI.

In scenario 2, the solution must be some catalog info that is not
affected by where the particular document is, since you want to use
this info when processing any document.  This is more like an application
preference, option, environment variable, configuration file, etc.

paul