xml-dev - Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents

[lee@sq.com]

Jon Bosak wrote:
> One possible method suggested by James Clark (thank you, James) is to
> adopt the convention used by Jade in the absence of the -d option:
> replace the extension of the document entity's URL or file name with
> .dsl and fetch that.  Thus, if a browser fetches
> >    http://docs.sun.com/foo/bar.html
> > then it should also look for
> >    http://docs.sun.com/foo/bar.dsl
> > and apply it to bar.html if found.

Note that if you are generating the XML from a CGi script, a Java
server plugin (e.g. Solaris 2.6's upcoming server) or otherwise,
you probably need to make sure that clients don't try to look for
files in the same "directory" as your SGML.

E.g. http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/113.dsl
does a database query into presumably DynaBase (right, Jon?).

In this case, you want a processing instruction (or some other markup)
to say that
* there is no catalog file
    http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/catalog

* the dtd is not accessible at
    http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/113.dtd
    (and _this_ is where it is...)

* the style sheet isn't there either
    (and _this_ is where it is...)

We had to do this for SoftQuad Panorama for exactly this reason.
For example, John Price-Wilkin served up the Middle English Corpus
in SGML using PAT, but couldn't easily cope with Panorama looking
for CATLOG or catalog in the middle of a database query

In general, if you find yourself doing probes to see if files exist
using http, you've probably made a design error somewhere, as this
isn't a good use of http.

So allow the processing instructions.

Lee


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