[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Public Identifiers
At 02:50 PM 9/18/98 -0400, Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre wrote: >John Coan wrote: > >>Coming soon: an SAX EntityResolver that processes Socats. > >Thank you! > >From someone to whom fpis are still incredibly useful, and to >whom socats (on admittedly brain-dead but very common operating >systems) provide a real service. But note that with the second edition of the SOCAT spec, you can remap system IDs just as you can public IDs. So even there, FPIs provide no unique facility, although the SOCAT mechanism itself does (redirection). Formal public identifiers have value because they are intended to be human meaningful and, when using registered owner names, guaranteed unique--but not because they are indirect. They are indirect only because, as far as I know, SGML formal public IDs are not valid file names in any common operating system. If they were, then you could use them as direct system IDs. It wouldn't matter whether their invocation was preceded by the keyword PUBLIC or SYSTEM. But note that, for example, within the scope of dedicated repositories, I would expect to be able to use FPIs as the primary name for resources, knowing that the redirection to the real resource name, the private repository ID, is transparent, just as the redirection of filenames to internal storage locations (e.g, i-nodes in Unix) is transparent in operating systems. The real issue is one of generally-available name redirection services ala DNS. We take DNS for granted because the Internet would be really inconvenient to use without it. We could have a similar system for resource names if the Internet community was willing to step up to funding the development and maintenance of it. Unfortunately, because the Internet is a distributed resource with no central management and largely hidden shared costs, it's difficult to get a general resource in place if people can get along with out it. You can't get along without DNS, so we have it. You can get along without generalized resource name redirection, so we don't have it. Note that things like PURLs, while useful, don't really solve the problem because they are really nothing more than server-side redirects, which we've always had and which anyone can provide unilaterally. The problem isn't really solved until we have a general service that everyone can take for granted. It may be, in the spirit of 80/20 solutions, that using server-side redirection is all we will ever really need or have. Providing a generalized resource name redirection service poses some difficult technical and social challenges that might prove more expensive to solve than the benefit provided can justify. Cheers, E. -- <Address HyTime=bibloc> W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer ISOGEN International Corp. 2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202. 214.953.0004 www.isogen.com </Address> xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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