Re: [xml-dev] RDDL in ZIP

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Rick Jelliffe wrote:


I have been looking at how to ZIP a RDDL directory. The purpose of this is
to have a portable format, widely useable on different machines and
readily creatable (esp. with WinZIP or with Java), which can bundle
DTDs, schema, stylesheets and scripts together, enough that a company
or document architect can bundle all the resources that their product or
local
system requires.  The RDDL resources available over the WWW are public
and, presumably, free; I think we need to have a way that local resources
and non-free resources can use the directory approach too.

    - excellent idea

It seems to me that all we need is a ZIP file containing
 1) a RDDL page (with any related CSS and GIFs etc at the root)
 2) subdirectory  schema/  containing DTDs, schemas
 3) subdirectory  documentation/ containing documentation
 4) subdirectory  software/ containing scripts for editing or viewing,
including CSS.

(The actual names and number of the directories are not really important.)
The relative locations and purposes of the resources are all specified in
the
RDDL page. This is open and extensible.

    - if the xlink:href's in the RDDL resources are relative URIs, then they
ought be relative to the base URI of the ZIP.

I think two things that are missing from RDDL that are needed are:
 1) A RDDL document currently does not have anyway to tell you
    what namespace it is for: the assumption is that you must have
    accessed the URL to get it, so you already know.  However
    we need to be able to ask the RDDL archive "what namespace
    are you for?"

    - generally xml:base is a way for a document to indicate its base URI.
It has been suggested that a RDDL document which explicitly sets its base
URI (using the xml:base pseudo attribute), would thus indicate the namespace
URI that it is intended to document. Of course a single RDDL document might
possibly apply to multiple namespace URIs -- perhaps we might use
appropriately labelled rddl:resources to "contain" namespace URIs which the
RDDL document is intended to refer to. For example
    <rddl:resouce
        xl:arcrole=http://www.rddl.org/purposes/namespace-uri
        xl:href=http://example.org/foo-namespace
    >...

    - would something like that work?

  2) There does not seem to be a clear way to associate a script
     with an element or attribute name.  We need something by
     which we can say "if you want to edit an eg:person, run this
     JavaScript" or "if you want to view a cals:table, run this
     TCL script".

Any suggestions?

    - perhaps the element or attribute name could be used to label a <div>
element whose content might contain <rddl:resource> elements that have
appropriately labelled purposes and natures and refer (xl:href) to a
document containing the script

- Jonathan


Rick Jelliffe





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