{"id":132,"date":"2003-06-05T15:51:00","date_gmt":"2003-06-05T19:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=181"},"modified":"2003-06-05T15:51:00","modified_gmt":"2003-06-05T19:51:00","slug":"so-thats-what-an-xml-catalog-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2003\/06\/so-thats-what-an-xml-catalog-does\/","title":{"rendered":"So that’s what an XML Catalog does"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard about XML Catalogs before, but never in a context that\npiqued my interest enough such that I’d want to go learn what they\nwere. Thanks to Norm Walsh’s\ndescription of them<\/a>\ntoday in his weblog, I now know.<\/p>\n\n

The idea, it seems, is that you need different identifiers in different\ncontexts. So, for example, a http URL for some document won’t be usable\nwhen you’re offline, so you need a way to package that identifier, with\nthe local one on the file system.<\/p>\n\n

My view is that while I agree this is a problem, I don’t think new standards\nare required to fix it. I suggest that better technology is what is required.<\/p>\n\n

“http:\/\/www.oasis-open.org\/docbook\/xml\/4.2\/docbookx.dtd” is an identifier\nfor a DocBook DTD, and independent of the online status of your notebook, it\nremains an identifier for that DocBook DTD. What’s needed are operating\nsystems, browsers, and network libraries that, when offline and asked for a\nrepresentation of the resource identified by that URI, returns a cached\nrepresentation.<\/p>\n\n

Another consequence of this is that “File->Save As” in a browser should\nbe de-emphasized. I’d prefer it be just “Save” or “Store” or something\nlike that where the user isn’t prompted for a file name. The implication\nbeing that the file already has an identifier, so why does it need a\ndifferent name on my computer? Obviously you’d still want access to\n“File->Save As” in some cases, but I don’t believe it’s what most people\nneed most of the time.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’ve heard about XML Catalogs before, but never in a context that piqued my interest enough such that I’d want to go learn what they were. Thanks to Norm Walsh’s description of them today in his weblog, I now know. The idea, it seems, is that you need different identifiers in different contexts. So, for […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}