On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 10:35:14AM +0200, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> OK. I guess I'll have to read the Oasis XML catalogs specs to *really*
> understand what can be done with this technology.
I just came across a really nice description[0] of how XML Catalogs are
designed to solve the entity resolution problem. This may give you a
better sense of where it can be used in the XML processing pipeline
provided by XXE.
Entity resolution is the process that an XML processor goes through
when it has been requested to find another file[1] in the course of
processing the file it's working on. The XML processor knows
labelling information about the file such as its system identifier
and possibly a name, public identifier, and so forth. These
identifiers can be used to determine the actual location of the
desired external file. This determination process (which "maps" the
known labelling information into an actual location) is called an
entity resolution, and the file that contains the specific mapping
information is called the entity resolution catalog.
In the case I had been describing, we have only the system identifier
(its URI) available, but that's all I want to resolve, anyway.
I firmly believe that XML Catalogs are a truly elegant and powerful tool
for managing this distributed computing architecture that we call the
Internet. For that reason, I greatly appreciate the XML Catalog support
present in XXE, as it adds a great deal of flexibility.
Take care,
John L. Clark
[0] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=entity
[1] file is used here for simplicity, but could be any other resource
consisting of such things as declarations, a parsed entity, an
unparsed entity, etc.
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