XML Catalog issue 3

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

# What do we do about delegate? Do we need to have a delegate for
# public identifiers, a delegate for system identifiers, etc.
# This is the functional class versus syntax issue again. URNs where?

Well, delegation for public ids is essential, both because no one else
can do it, and because 9401 had it.  Delegation for system ids is
certainly useful.  The only counterargument IMHO is that HTTP
redirection already does the job, but that doesn't help with system
ids that are file: or ftp: or mid: URIs, or URNs.  Delegation allows
one to map an HTTP hierarchy to a local hierarchy, thus:

	delegate-system "http://remote.example/foo" "file:///remote/foo"

or the same for FTP.  Therefore I support adding it.

For syntax, I propose adding attributes to the delegate element.
The obvious choices are systemIdStartString and URIStartString.

However, RDF already has the concept of a URIStartString, called
a "prefix".  So I support changing "publicIDStartString" to
"publicPrefix" and adding "systemPrefix" and "URIPrefix".

-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein