Is Dedicated Hosting for Critical DTDs Necessary? 140
pcause asks: "Recently there was a glitch, when someone at Netscape took down a page that had an important DTD (for RSS), used by many applications and services. This got me thinking that many or all of the important DTDs that software and commerce depend on are hosted at various commercial entities. Is this a sane way to build an XML based Internet infrastructure? Companies come and go all of the time; this means that the storage and availability of those DTDs is in constant jeopardy. It strikes me that we need an infrastructure akin to the root server structure to hold the key DTDs that are used throughout the industry. What organization would be the likely custodian of such data, and what would be the best way to insure such an infrastructure stays funded?"
Re:DTD? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Centralization (Score:5, Informative)
This is known as a URN [wikipedia.org]. URLs and URNs are together known as URIs.
Don't know what a DTD is? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Type_Defini
Re:Centralization (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet:_URI_scheme [wikipedia.org]
Not again (Score:4, Informative)
XML catalog files let your app use local copies... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't use them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I know! (Score:1, Informative)
You laugh, but ICANN's Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has a track record of running countless protocol registries. i.e. port numbers, SNMP private enterprise numbers, MIME types etc. It seems to make sense to me.
Re:Centralization (Score:4, Informative)
The defects of the URN/URI/URL mechanism were well known at the time this was discussed in the working groups and SIGs while XML was gestating.
The correct solution would have been to fix the outstanding problems with FPIs and use a combination of local catalog and DNS-style resolution, but this was turned down. Perhaps it's time to wake it up.
In the 1990s I did try to devise a resolution server for FPIs, in the hope that someone like the (then) GCA (now IdeAlliance) -- who were the ISO 9070 Registration Authority and theoretically still are -- would pick up the idea.
I still have the large collection of SGML DTDs used at the time, now largely redundant, but replacing it with current XML is not the problem. This is something that should probably be discussed at the Markup conference in Montreal this summer.