xml-dev - Re: Namespace URI address resources

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
>  - a stylesheet
>  - more stylesheets (because of cascading, or because you only
>    believe in one of the stylesheet religions)
>  - some related java classes
>  - some related COM objects
>  - a DTD
>  - a set of documents involved in an extended hyperlink group
>  - a topic map
>  - some graphics
>  - some other multimedia resources
>  - etc etc etc etc

Me, I go for the "etc"!

Most of those should be overridable ... in an E-Commerce
system, there may be a default stylesheet for a purchase order
issued by someone else, but my company may prefer to present it
differently.  And similarly the default classes may be oriented
towards purchasers, rather than suppliers -- and if I work for a
supplier, the default classes would do the wrong thing.  (Touches
on the workflow issues someone brought up a while back.  Everyone
in a workflow system may work with the same data differently.)


> It is becoming painfully obvious that we need a general-purpose
> packaging mechanism to deliver an arbitrary number of related
> whatevers along with a piece of XML payload.

There are plenty of such mechanisms around.  But tools using any
of them seem lacking.


>	  There has been a lot
> of discussion about this around the W3C.  It may be the case that
> multipart-mime provides a general solution for this problem (don't
> understand it well enough myself to have an opinion), or perhaps
> we need an XML Packaging Language to use for this purpose. -Tim

The multipart-related MIME type (RFC 2387) sure seems like it
ought to work, at least for cases where one can rely on a single
MIME object to do the job, like HTTP or E-Mail.

    ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2387.txt

Multipart-related documents basically let you send a bunch of data
as parts of a MIME object and refer to them internally; you might
have the first part

	<!DOCTYPE root SYSTEM "cid:foo.dtd">
	<root> ... </root>

and the second part would be "foo.dtd".  Similarly for other
resources identified by URI.

- Dave

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