John L. Clark wrote: > 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.
Yes, <include location="wherever" system="true"/> is a hack. Good ideas. We will really seriously think about using XML catalogs for: * XML Schema locations. * included/imported XSLT style sheets. * imported CSS style sheets. * included XXE configurations (and get rid of the ugly hack system="true").
