xml-dev - Re: URNs as SYSTEM IDs

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> was heard to say:
| >They can retrieve the content if they have some practical entity
| >management system in place, such as OASIS TR9401 Catalogs (through,
| >for example, a SAX entityResolver).
| 
| The problem is that this kind of infrastructure is barely deployed, and
| many developers don't even know of its existence.  Like many validating
| parsers, they're just going to punt when they hit a URN SystemLiteral.

True. Alas. Well, the entity resolution technical committee of OASIS
is working to recast TR9401 in an XML framework which might help.
But even before then, there's certainly plenty of free code[1] around
to do the job; it's dead simple in a SAX parser.

| This draft seems to be an attempt to create a parallel to PUBLIC without
| using PUBLIC:
| 
| >It is standard practice within W3C
| >standards to forego the use of the PUBLIC identifier in favor of
| >'well known' SYSTEM identifiers. There have been several IETF
| >standards that have simply created non-existent URIs in order to
| >simply identify but not resolve the SYSTEM identifier for some given
| >XML document. 

Oh, barf. I can't tell what level IANA thinks they're registering.
For XML Namespaces[2] it's reasonable to have non-existent URIs, but
for that's not true of SYSTEM identifiers (ever).

| I'm not sure where this leaves us - in the land of rarely-deployed
| architecture, I suspect.

I suppose. Names are not addresses and these things need *names*
folks, oh, you know, I'm about to give up on that point...Happy
Thanksgiving everyone.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://www.arbortext.com/News_and_Events/recent_news_pages/Recent_12/recent_12.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/
-- 
Norman.Walsh@East.Sun.COM | Simplicity is always a virtue.--Edward Abbey
XML Technology Center     | 
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    |