[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SAX and delayed entity loading
At 04:01 PM 12/3/98 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote: >I know it's not about software. How can you guarantee that in a hundred >years someone will be able to find the identifiers used in your notations? >Will they be at the same network address? Will they have to go through yet >another stack of backup tapes? What if you referenced something outside of >your network and its control, and there is nothing left... (I think >they'll start wishing it was more about software and less about indirection >at that point.) You're right, the URL for the XML spec is not sufficient (but neither is "<?xml?>", since you need to know what thing defines what that magic number means). In thinking about it, I think the only thing that will be reliable is to depend on a non-electronic, human-primary, long-term repository like the Library of Congress. If the XML spec had a Library of Congress number (it may, for all I know), then I could use that as the public ID and be assured that my intent is understandable for at least as long as the Library of Congress persists as an institution. Since we are ultimately dependent on the persistent of human institutions, I think that's about the most we can hope for (but see my post to comp.text.sgml some time back about very long term archiving of documents)). If the resource exists electronically, the public ID can always be mapped to it. If the resource does not exist electronically, you call the library and ask them if they have a copy you can borrow. If no copies exist, then there's not much you can do in any case except start in on some cyperpaleontology to see if you can dig up code somewhere that embodies the information provided by the spec ("I seem to remember seeing a diskette with the source around for XP a few years back--'ought four I think it was--you kids today wouldn't believe what sort of things we had for computers back then, no sir. We used to type with our fingers for hours--and we liked it! Here it is. 'Course, I haven't had a reader for these darn diskettes for about fourty years or so--maybe there's one over at the University in the basement of the archives somewhere. Good luck kid.") Thus, the declaration for XML as a notation should be something like: <!NOTATION somelocalname PUBLIC "+//IDN loc.us.gov//NOTATION TZ 1234:W3C eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Recommendation 1.0//EN" > Nothing less is reliable in the time scales I normally care about. For the other arguments you raise, I can only conclude that we are not communicating and/or are operating in such different operating environments that our requirements are too far diverged for us to come to agreement on the issue. I suspect we are both right with respect to our primary requirements. 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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