Re: RFC: Simple XML Event-Based API for Java

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 19 Dec 1997 15:21:49

At 19:19 19/12/97 +0700, James Clark wrote:
>
>Suppose you have a document doc.xml that references an external parsed
>entity chapters/3.xml and suppose chapters/3.xml contains some element
>with an attribute that is a relative URL "4.xml". I would claim that
>the appropriate URL to use as the base for resolving that relative URL
>is the URL of the resource that contains the URL, so that relative to
>the document URL, that relative URL should be interpreted as
>chapters/4.xml rather than 4.xml. But unless the parser passes through
>positional information, there's no way an application can do this.

I would strongly support this interpretation. It's the natural one from
HTML browsers and it is what I have implemented in XLL in JUMBO. I have
found that the best way forward for me is that every WF fragment possesses
a URL, since it may further reference other fragments. This works OK for me
as far as I have got, but I am not a URL specialist. I don't know what
happens when we get XML which is formed 'in vacuo' - e.g. as part of a
serialized object, typed in on the command line, etc. :-)

P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
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