[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents
> >E.g. http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/113.dsl > >does a database query into presumably DynaBase (right, Jon?). > > NO! This is DynaWeb! Sorry for the error -- I meant DynaWeb. Honest. > >In this case, you want a processing instruction (or some other markup) > >to say that > >* there is no catalog file > > http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/catalog > > You *could* generate a catalog, which would point at the DTD and the > stylesheets. If DynaWeb had been less powerful, or you (or Jon in this case!) less familiar with it, that may not have been an option -- with some other SGML databases I've seen, it'd be quite hard. One way would be to have a shell script front end that special-cases all files called "catalog" and returns a hard-wired catalog file... but even that isn't always easy in this world of automatically-generated CGI programs with special hooks into the servers, so you can't simply unhook them a little. So believe me (please!), there will be people, perhaps not using DynaWeb, who can't or won't put a catalog file in there. > >* the dtd is not accessible at > > http://docs.su.com/ab2/alluser/ADVOSUG/@xmlChunk/113.dtd > > (and _this_ is where it is...) > ... > >* the style sheet isn't there either > > (and _this_ is where it is...) > > [...] It would be quite possible to resolve all of the things you > outline above inside the configuration files (easy even). Now do it with Astoria, Documentum, Saros DM, Texel, etc., including handling a server login to fetch the catalog file, a server login to fetch the style sheet, a server login to fetch the DTD, and a bunch of impatient users. Yes, you coud say the web front ends could cache recent login connections so they didn't log in again each time, but generally they don't seem to do that. Then deal with systems that can't deal with the DTD inside the database. (if DTDs were in SGML format... but that's another issue) > >In general, if you find yourself doing probes to see if files exist > >using http, you've probably made a design error somewhere, as this > >isn't a good use of http. > > Agreed! Heh! > >So allow the processing instructions. > > Or use catalogs. Well, I'm not saying forbid catalogs, although I can't abide the thought of mandating all that code for XML-compliant application. I'm suggesting providing an alternative. Our experience with conneting Panorama with a wide range of databases has been that we needed to do this. Maybe if all the databases had been built by Gavin :-) we'd have been able to stick with Catalogs, and we'd always have known where to look for catalog even with URLs like http://www.xxx.zzz/bin/get-doc/40197&user=z305&pass=df4ec5c9&d=113&f=7 where d=113 is the document chunk ID, get-doc is the program, 40197 is a PATH_INFO parameter used for versioning, and the URL for CATALOG is http://www.xxx.zzz/bin/get-doc/40197&user=z305&pass=df4ec5c9&d=491&f=7 and no, I'm not making this up (except I've changed the field names from those used in any one particular currently shipping commercial system). Panorama's default algorithm would look for http://www.xxx.zzz/bin/get-doc/catalog which obviously won't work in this case. So we need to say where to find the CAALOG file so we can find where to find the DTD. Or, we put an explicit URL to the DTD. There's somewhere to do that in SGML, but not for a style sheet or a navspec/table of contents definition file, nor any other ancilliary non-SGML files. So we use processing instructions in those cases where it's necessary. Does that make a better case? If people end up saying no, it's clear that all the commercial applications will do this anyway, but each in their own incompatible way. I hereby volunteer us to be amongst the first :-) Lee -- Liam Quin, lee@s... | lq-text freely available Unix text retrieval Senior Technical Consultant | FAQs: Metafont fonts, OPEN LOOK UI, OpenWindows SoftQuad Inc. +1 416 544-9000 | xfonttool (Unix xfontsel in XView) http://www.softquad.com/ | the barefoot programmer xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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