XCatalog

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* John Cowan
| 
| The main reason is that it's unreasonable, IMHO, to ask a parser to
| recursively parse XML-XCatalog format while it's parsing some other
| document.  

I suppose there are two issues here:
 
  - reentrant parsers and
  - bottomless recursions in that parsing requires a catalog, the
  parsing of which requires another catalog...

I can't imagine that the first issue would present serious problems.
XCatalogs are no more than external entities that are not part of the
document, and it's also possible to first parse the XCatalog and only
afterwards parse the document.

The recursion issue is potentially more troublesome.  In my case I
solve it by not registering the callback resolvers that actually use
catalog information when I parse XCatalogs.  So the problem should be
easy to avoid, and users should not be surprised when they find
catalog features unavailable in XCatalog instances.

So on reflection I think XCatalogs are far less troublesome than for
example parameter entities.

| Socat format on the other hand is an easy hack.

It's not hard to implement, no, but the fact remains that more parsers
support XCatalogs than SO Catalogs.  Worse really _is_ better, I
think, also in this case.
 
--Lars M.


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