xml-dev - Re: External Resources: Catalogs, XInclude, XBase

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Greetings,

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Paul Grosso wrote:

> >Also, wouldn't a Packaging mechanism require similar functionality?
> 
> I'm not sure what similar functionality you mean.  A packaging
> mechanism (i.e., some way to be able to refer to--and perhaps
> facilitate transmission of--a related set of files) would sure
> be nice.  It's on the "future" list of the XML Activity, but at 
> the present, there aren't enough cycles to attack the problem.  

As Paul points out in his OASIS TR9401, there's already a standard
(though barely deployed) packaging format, SDIF.  There's another more
general mechanism described in [1], which both describes a specific
mechanism (sbento) and a way of describing which mechanism, of a range
of possibilities, you're using in a particular case.

Now, I haven't actually used either of these mechanisms, and I may,
therefore, be reading more functionality into them than is there in
fact, but they do have the cardinal virtue of current existence.

There is therefore no _obvious_ need for the W3C to define its
own packaging mechanism, other than (a) SDIF and sbento were
not-invented-here, and (b) the document [1] is the spec for the H-word.

Is this really something the W3C has to worry about?  Couldn't it just
publicise the current solutions?

All the best,

Norman


[1] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg4/docs/n1920/html/clause-A.6.7.html#clause-A.6.7.6.1


-- 
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Norman Gray                        http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK     norman@astro.gla.ac.uk



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