XCatalog proposal draft 0.1

[Paul Grosso]

At 15:29 1998 07 27 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>Murray Altheim scripsit:
>> You speak of an XML world as if it existed as a fixed entity.
>
>No, but one part of it is fixed: the spec.
>
>> [I]f people wish to build
>> large systems based on XML, I'm suggesting we look at the reasons why 9401
>> has its feature set and use this to inform our design.
>
>As far as I can see, the reason is that SGML doesn't give any
>definite meaning to SystemIds, and some kind of outside support
>is needed to map them to filenames or other things that
>programs understand.  XML *does* define the meaning of SystemIds,
>by reference to various URI documentation.

System ids have been pretty obvious in most cases for decades.
While it is true that 8879 allows system ids to be almost anything,
all the SGML systems I've seen figure a regular looking system id
is a file name, and that works fine.  In fact, it wasn't until 
the third version of the SGML Open Catalog TR9401 that we added
mapping of system ids.  

The real reason for the SGML Open Catalog was because 8879 did not 
define a way to map public ids into much of anything.  And neither 
does XML.



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