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Subject: Re: naming catalogs
/ Lauren Wood <lauren@softquad.com> was heard to say: | The catalog resolver should, as a fallback when no other catalog is defined, | look for a file named "xcatalog" (I don't really care about the name) in an | implementation-defined directory Do you really mean an implementation defined directory? You mean a directory (such as the directory of the base URI of the document, or something along those lines) defined by the standard, don't you? | (for example, with the document, in a | directory where DTDs are commonly found, or some other choice). Maybe you really do mean implementation defined. Ok, that's fine by me. You're implementation can specify any fallback it wants, IMHO. My implementation looks for a 'catalogs' property in a CatalogManager.properties file on your CLASSPATH :-) | In | circumstances where files were sent using MIME, the xcatalog would be | expected to be one of the files. Uh, that's just gotta be out of scope. For the simple case of a set of files on a filesystem or web server, the fallback might be reasonable. But I think any scheme that involves packaging should leave this entirely up to the manifest and the package processing application. | We want to make it easy to use catalogs; I think having a default name helps | with this and I can't see the downside to it. Here's the downside. And it's bitten me more than once in SGML systems using TR9401. If you say that the filename 'xcatalog' will always be interpreted as a catalog, it silently changes the semantics of your processor in ways that may not be immediately obvious. For example, it happens that at least one stylesheet package for Jade ships with a 'catalog' file in the directory with one of the stylesheets or DTDs that specifies SGMLDECL '/path/to/some/standard/looking/sgml.declaration' This works fine except that under some circumstances (I've forgotten exactly how to trigger this bug; I've tripped over it just infrequently enough not to remember the details until I've been debugging for 10 minutes) this makes Jade barf on XML documents because it interprets them with the wrong declaration. So I'd summarize things this way: 1. For non-naive systems, the default catalog file is unnecessary. They're setup using whatever methods the catalog resolver gives them (property files, environment variables etc.). 2. For non-naive authors, the PI gives them a solution that will allow them to make things work even on naive systems. 3. For naive systems, the default name works sometimes but when it fails it's much harder to explain and debug. Be seeing you, norm -- Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM | To enjoy yourself and make others enjoy XML Standards Engineer | themselves, without harming yourself or any Technology Dev. Group | other; that, to my mind, is the whole of Sun Microsystems, Inc. | ethics.--Chamfort
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