Re: Entities and XPointers

David G. Durand (dgd@cs.bu.edu)
Tue, 2 Dec 1997 16:35:59 -0500 (EST)

On Dec 2, 5:40pm, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Subject: Entities and XPointers
> While they don't provide the actuation flexibility or many of the other
> features of XML-Link, it may be possible to create external entities that use
> XPointers in the URL. Of course, this would require that either the
processing
> application can cope with XPointers (unlikely in this case), or that the
> server can interpret the XPointer and return only the chunk requested.

There's no reason that you can't do this at the server side, and a client that
was so sophisticated could interpret the URL (but, pracitcally speaking, I
wouldn't expect many such to exist).

> Provided that I can make the server interpret the XPointer (using | as the
> connector, or the XML-XPTR query syntax) and return only the chunk requested,
> is this kosher? It's mixing and matching the spec, which I'm not sure is
> appropriate.

I'm not sure about using the | connector. It's ideal for the
maybe-client/maybe-server case, but I think those special URLs may be an
XLL-only item -- thus not required to be interpreted by XML parsers. But the
use of query strings (with '?') and smart servers to serve up partial XML data
is part of what we wanted to enable by using URLs in XML in the first place.

-- David

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Boston University Computer Science | Dynamic Diagrams
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