Re: [relax-ng] Re: The relaxng-compact processing instruction

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

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/ "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <EB2M-MRT@asahi-net.or.jp> was heard to say:
| On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 07:58:58 -0700
| Kohsuke Kawaguchi <Kohsuke.Kawaguchi@sun.com> wrote:
|
|> Is it a bad idea to have a public id? If I'm an user, I'd probably want
|> to have a public id, which I can use to resolve schemas locally.
|
| XML Catalogs of OASIS allows "Mapping the URI reference of a resource
| (a namespace name, stylesheet, image, etc.) to another URI reference."  
| I think that we only have to use this feature.

That's the only feature we have to use, but it would be nice to have a
public identifier so that we could use that feature too.

I think the easiest way to demonstrate why is with an example using
DTDs because they have both now.

Consider the following document prologue:

  <!DOCTYPE book SYSTEM "file:///c:/xml/docbook/docbookx.xml">

That might work fine on your system, but it's meaningless on mine. However,
if you had provided both a public and a system identifier:

  <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
                        "file:///c:/xml/docbook/docbookx.xml">

then it would have been immediately useful on my system and I would
never have cared what system identifier you used.

We could have made this work without public identifiers, by using a more
global system identifier:

  <!DOCTYPE book SYSTEM "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd";>

but then everyone has to plan ahead and everyone has to be using
catalogs, or living with some really horrible latency everytime they
validate.

Allowing users to specify public identifiers would be of great value.
The Entity Res. TC tried to convince the W3C XML Schema WG of this
fact, but failed.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | All our foes are mortal.--Paul Valéry
XML Standards Architect |
Web Tech. and Standards |
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
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