Re: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Michael Brennan wrote:

 > These seem to me to be quite different from RDDL.

Yes.

 > They also appear
 > to be useless to me for my needs. They seem to be geared solely
 > toward resolving public entity IDs to system IDs (and vice versa).

Public to system, system to system.

 > How do I use them to identify a collection of resources associated
 > with an XML namespace?

You don't.

 > (If I'm missing something, please let me
 > know. I have no experience with SGML, nor with catalogs. I'm trying
 >  to absorb all of this now.)

The purpose of catalogs is to prevent your web server from being
hammered by millions of sites all trying to download your DTD to
validate your widely distributed documents.

With catalog technology widely disseminated, this is not necessary.
Each site can make a local copy of the DTD, and then use a local catalog
to map the central, standardized URI to a local URI or file name.

Futhermore, you can exploit Formal Public Identifiers to give DTDs
and the like long, meaningful names that don't depend on the vagaries
of the DNS.

 > I'm very excited about RDDL. RDDL is simple, lightweight, easy to
 > implement, and offers the added bonus that it is displayable in
 > ordinary web browsers. The approach of placing human readable
 > documentation at the end of the URL that also contains a machine
 > readable catalog of other related resources is a perfect approach,
 > IMO. I love this. This is great!

I'm totally in sympathy with this.

-- 
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