Re: 16 July 2001 Working Draft

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 17:05 2001 07 16 -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
>Published[1] a few minutes ago:
>
>1. Removed xcatalog, put oasis-xml-catalog PI back.
>2. Made 'catalog list' => 'catalog entry file list' for consistency.
>3. Sorted the bibliography entries.
>4. Added John's suggested wording about urn:publicid

At the top of section 5, we say:

  Applications conforming to this Standard must provide
  some (implementation dependent) mechanism to establish the
  initial list of catalog entry files. This may be a preferences
  dialog, an environment variable, an application properties file,
  or any other appropriate mechanism.

Do we mean to allow *any* mechanism including a hardwired internal
list, or do we mean to require a "user-settable" mechanism?  Assuming
the latter, we might want to reword, such as:

  Applications conforming to this Standard must provide
  some (implementation dependent) mechanism that allows the user to establish...
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In 5.1, the intro sentence includes "...identify a catalog or catalogs..."
Delete "or catalogs" since a catalog is a list of catalog entry files,
and it is therefore unclear what the plural of catalog would mean.
(Then change "are" to "is" for agreement.)

In the fourth para of this section, "the catalog(s) identified", change
to "the catalog entry file(s) identified".

In the fifth para, "Catalogs referenced" -> "Catalog entry files referenced".

In the first bullet point, "processing instruction must appear in the 
prologue before the document type declaration."  Change to:
"processing instruction must appear in the prologue after the XML
declaration and before the start of the document type declaration."

In the third para of the first bullet point, "Applications should recover 
by ignoring catalogs" -> "Applications should recover by ignoring catalog
entry files mentioned in such <?oasis-xml-catalog?> processing instruction".

In the second bullet point, "each catalog specified" -> "each catalog 
entry file specified".

In the third bullet point, "If the catalog is specified" -> "If the 
catalog entry file is specified".

In the final bullet point, we say, "The URI that identifies the catalog 
entry file must not be subject to catalog resolution."  I find the use
of "must" ambiguous here.  Wouldn't "is" be clearer than "must"?  It
is not a permission thing, it's a statement of fact:  that URI is not
subject to catalog resolution.

On the subject of delegation, we talk about "longest match".  Now that
we are doing normalization, I'm not sure "longest" is well-defined.  In
any case, I think we have to define it explicitly.  Are we counting
normalized or unnormalized characters, and what do we count when the
URN is in the publicid URN namespace?  (Yuck!)

paul