Re: [xml-dev] Compelling use case for XML Catalogs?

[Chris Maloney <voldrani@gmail.com>]

Catalogs can also be done in a modular and portable way.  For example,
a set of DTDs can be bundled with a catalog file that references all
the resources in it using relative system identifiers.  Then this set
of DTDs, along with its catalog, can be relocated anywhere you want.
To plug it in to a system, just add a single "nextCatalog" entry in
the main catalog file that your system uses.

So if you're designing a set of resources -- which could be anything,
not just DTDs -- that have URIs as names (and most things do -- see
this blog post from Norm Walsh for a fun read:
http://norman.walsh.name/2004/03/03/266NorthPleasant), but that you
want to be accessible by people offline, then you could define a
catalog file for them.


On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com> wrote:
> On 6/10/2011 6:16 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>
> A catalog is just a map of URIs (and public ids, if you want) to other
> URIs.  It's a standard format designed by OASIS, paralleling an earlier
> SGML catalog standard.  It's supported by a number of parsers and
> validators.
>
> What more arguments do you want?  There are a number of ways this
> *could* be done; doing it *this* way means it just works.
>
> That makes sense.  It is a good to have well-known standard. We've just
> found it more convenient to package known DTDs with our Java classes and
> reference them using a resolver that can retrieve resources from the
> classpath; I don't think that capability is built into parsers, typically
> though.
>
> -Mike
>