Re: retrieving vs. dereferencing

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Lauren Wood wrote:


> XML 1.0 second edition changed that to "The SystemLiteral is called the 
> entity's system identifier. It is a URI reference (as defined in [IETF RFC 
> 2396], updated by [IETF RFC 2732]), meant to be dereferenced to obtain input 
> for the XML processor to construct the entity's replacement text."


I think we were mainly concerned to get the correct term "URI reference"
rather than "URI" in there, and to get rid of the "may".


> The definition of derefencing seems to be rather fuzzy - is it fuzzy enough 
> for us to be allowed to have a catalog processor in there? The URI RFC 
> doesn't seem to allow for any catalog processor that I could see in its 
> definition of the URI reference.


No problem, I think.  RFC 2396, section 1.2, says:


#   Although many URL schemes are named after protocols, this does not
#   imply that the only way to access the URL's resource is via the named
#   protocol.  Gateways, proxies, caches, and name resolution services
#   might be used to access some resources, independent of the protocol
#   of their origin, and the resolution of some URL may require the use
#   of more than one protocol (e.g., both DNS and HTTP are typically used
#   to access an "http" URL's resource when it can't be found in a local
#   cache).


I interpret our catalogs as "name resolution services" within the
meaning of this paragraph.

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