Re: SAX and delayed entity loading

W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@dns.isogen.com)
Thu, 03 Dec 1998 13:31:12 -0600

At 02:02 PM 12/3/98 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 12:48 PM 12/3/98 -0600, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>>Unless I've misunderstood something, a MIME type is still an indirection to
>>the definition of that MIME type. I.e., "text/xml" is a pointer to the RFC
>>that establishes that MIME type. But then a problem is: where do I got to
>>figure out what RFC a given MIME type maps to? What if the MIME type is an
>>"x-*" MIME type, what do I do then?
>
>And what if the notation in the XML/SGML document I've got on my computer
>references a proprietary standard or viewer that I don't have? Same
>useless data problem I had before...

It's not a software issue, it's a knowing what the data type is so I can
get the right software issue. If someone gives you a document with a
useless external ID for a notation, that's a problem between you and the
author of that document and no mechanism can fix that problem.

>Maybe genuinely extensible viewing _software_ will get us past this
>thicket, but I don't think notations have any inherent advantages over MIME
>types beyond their being a superset, allowing them to reference even more
>lose-able resources.

But it's not just about *viewing*, it's about processing of all sorts.
Pulling down a plug-in for viewing a particular kind of data is only one
small application of notations. If you are only thinking about the problem
in terms of viewing things on the Web, then you are missing the point.

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>