Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 11:33 AM 14/11/01 -0800, Joe English wrote:
>Earlier Sean quoted me as saying that I had given up
>on DTDs.  I haven't at all; what I *have* given up on
>is <!DOCTYPE ...> declarations.
...
>URLs can break in too many ways.  
...
> Document-relative
>SYSTEM identifiers are a maintenance nightmare; 
...
>Most importantly: it's very difficult to ensure that the URI
>for a DTD will last as long as the documents that reference it.
>Remember the time that Netscape reorganized their web site and
>all the headline aggregators on the Web suddenly stopped working?
>This sort of thing is an unacceptable risk.

All good points.  But I don't think they have much to do with
interoperability of XML.  You've pointed out what is a horrible
problem - the infrastructure has really lousy support for 
dealing with multiple related resourcse that you need to 
bring together to do a job.  There are little bits & pieces
of machinery around: multipart-mime, RDDL, etc.  Interestingly,
they tried to start a "packaging" activity up over at W3C but
it expired for lack of interest. 

I've been kind of surprised that there isn't more energy
being pointed at this problem.  Still am. -Tim