I noticed a brief mention that this change would be coming in the next
version, but I refrained from commenting at that time because I did not
understand the reason. It is situations such as this that might warrant
a little bit more design transparency with users, although there may be
good reasons for not doing this.
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 03:49:40PM +0100, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> * XML catalogs are no longer used to resolve the
> locations found in the href attribute of
> xi:include. This is a functional regression
> but at least now the behavior of XXE is
> consistent. Previously, it was possible to use
> XML catalogs to resolve XIncludes but, in such
> case, Edit|Document Reference|Edit Referenced
> Document (among other things) did not work.
One of the goals of document authoring is to be able to assign documents
unique names and make reference to documents using these unique names,
thereby facilitating referential integrity. Because of this, I feel
obliged to push back against this change, and to encourage maturity in
those parts of the XXE architecture that deal with URI references. I
would be very interested in hearing more detail behind the problems that
the XXE team found to exist in this feature.
If you have referenced a global URI from a document (either using
XIncludes or a language-specific mechanism such as the img element in
xhtml or the imagedata element in DocBook), then the situation breaks
down into cases. Either the URI can be resolved, or it can't. If it
can't be resolved, then it makes perfect sense to warn the user and
display placeholder content, such as that provided by xi:fallback when
using XIncludes. If it can be resolved, then it is either resolved
locally or remotely. If it is resolved locally, then the local
representation should be returned when examining the referencing
document as well as when choosing the Edit Referenced Document function.
If it is resolved remotely, then the referencing document could display
the included remote content. Should the user want to edit the
referenced document, XXE could negotiate with that user on whether or
not to save a local copy. Note that XML Catalogs could be used to
resolve either locally or remotely; the point is that the resolution
should take place not just for reading, but also for opening for edit.
Take care,
John L. Clark
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