RE: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 13:32 2001 01 05 -0800, Michael Brennan wrote:
>> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
>> [...]
>> OTOH it might be that the job of saying "What are the associated
>> for this namespace?" and "What is the local meaning of this
>> system id or public id?" are actually quite orthogonal, and should
>> be handled by separate mechanisms.
>
>I'm inclined to agree with this. Perhaps I'm naive on this, but I think
>there are many who will choose to deal exclusively (as much as possible)
>with schemas and namespaces (and undoubtedly many who will choose to stick
>with DTDs and Entity IDs). For those who only want to deal with schemas and
>namespaces, of what use to them is a catalog that just binds system IDs to
>public entity IDs?

All the catalogs mentioned (TR9401, Cowen's XML Catalog, and the 
latest OASIS xmlcat work) have nothing specifically to do with DTDs 
and are still useful in the absence of DTDs.  (Note, you can still
declare entities when using schemas.)

Since public and system ids are parts of an external entity's 
external identifier, if you don't use entity declarations at all,
it is true that you won't have many public and/or system ids to map,
but it may still make sense to use the xmlcat to map a namespace name
to a (single) URI.  What is probably better done elsewhere than in
the {public id|system id|namespace name} -> URI mapping catalog
is the "description of the namespace and links to all its associated
resources" which is what RDDL is about.

paul