SAX 2.0 baseURI property was: Re: SAX 2.0 Enhancement proposal (2nd Ed)

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Rob Lugt wrote:

> Jonathan Borden wrote:
>
> > >
> > > 2) In order to furnish the application with the base URI of the entity
> > > containing the ENTITY declaration, I would like your opinion on a
choice
> > > between:-
> >
> > > b) A new standard property: http://xml.org/sax/properties/baseURI.
This
> > > property will contain the baseURI as described in (a) above.
> >
> > This is actually an important property to have, and is one of the (few)
> > missing information items of the XML Infoset that SAX fails to provide.
I
> > think we need _both_ but I am more interested in the base URI property
> than
> > the standard feature.
>
> Can I take that as a vote for option (b) - the creation of a new property,
> leaving the systemId to contain just the system identifier from the xml
> document?

Yes, to be clear, and for reasons including this, but also for other
reasons, SAX needs to have a standard way to communicate the base URI to an
application.

> If we are going to have a property containing the baseURI, there
> is no need to overload the systemId parameter with it.

perhaps this is true. Given an (absolute URI form) systemId and a base URI,
cannot we -reconstruct- a relative URI used to get from the base URI to the
systemId in URI space: i.e.

relativeURI = absolutizedSystemId - baseURI

via an inverse of the rules that create: absolutizedSystemId = baseURI +
relativeURI

(where + and - are not literal string operations but rather represent the
absolutization transform in RFC 2396)

-Jonathan