Re: Dumb questions about PUBLIC IDs

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Charles Reitzel <creitzel@mediaone.net> was heard to say:
| I'm curious.  I don't see it in the XML spec, but are PUBLIC IDs
| really supposed to be in the form "-//Foo//Bar//Baz". 

No, there's nothing about XML (or even SGML) public identifiers that
required that format.

| Is this an
| ISO format?  If so, where is it defined?

Public identifiers in that format are known as "formal public
identifiers" and they are defined principally by ISO 8879

| The grammatical production "PubidLiteral" and its rules for space
| compression seem to encompass either a URI, the format above, and
| just about anything else you'd like to put in there.

Anything that uses only the pubid chars is fair game after normalizing
the spaces.

| Tool survey: IE5.5 won't display a file unless the PUBLIC ID is in
| the format above.

That's a bug.

| XML Spy doesn't care.  Expat doesn't care.
| Xerces doesn't care.

No tool should care.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@East.Sun.COM    | The art of being wise is the art of
XML Standards Engineer       | knowing what to overlook.--William James
Technology Development Group | 
Sun Microsystems, Inc.       |