On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 10:17:30AM -0700, John L. Clark wrote:
> 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.
In fact, I remembered another really slick use of XML catalogs in XXE
that I had been contemplating before. Some time ago I expressed a
desire to be able to "extend" the core XXE CSS configuration in user
configurations. At the time, I think I suggested implementing this
using an additional XXE configuration item like cfg:import or similar.
However, with full XML catalog support and a bit of forethought, this
sort of problem vanishes.
Consider this. In order to extend the XXE stylesheets, a user
configuration imports, using standard CSS mechanisms, a well-documented
global configuration base:
@import
url(http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/config/docbook/css/docbook.css);
In theory, there doesn't even have to be anything at these URLs, because
we will use XML catalogs to resolve them. The built-in XXE
configurations can include catalog entries for their particular global
configuration URL:
<!--
From the catalog distributed with the XXE docbook configuration
-->
<rewriteURI
uriStartString="http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/config/docbook/";
rewritePrefix="."
xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog" />
And so, transparently, whenever anything, even beyond CSS or XSLT,
references something using the global XXE docbook configuration name, it
is translated to the distributed configuration of the XXE the user is
currently running. I think that in a similar fashion, this would do
away with the need for the <include location="wherever" system="true"
/>; users could instead use the well-documented global location and XXE
could transparently (although using a well-documented and configurable
mechanism) resolve those URLs locally.
Ah, how sweet it will be...
Take care,
John L. Clark
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