98413 - (xmlcatalog) Implement XML Catalogs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: XML, enhancement)

Description

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

The XML Catalogs is an OASIS committee specification, basically an "SGML Catalog
for XML". Simplified, a catalog's function is to map public identifiers to
system identifiers.

The specification was developed under the Entity Resolution committee:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/

The actual specification is at (Aug 6 2001): 

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec.html

Currently there are at least five tools that support this specification ranging
from gnome-xml to Sun's Java Resolver classes and some Perl modules.
Implementing this specification would allow us to easily add support for some
well-known DTDs (based on their public identifiers) by placing the DTDs locally
into dtd or chrome directory (we read external DTDs if they are there). This is
also a performance issue: if a match is found in the XML Catalog and we can load
the DTD from a local file, we do not need to load it from the web.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht]

xpinstall packages should be able to register new catalogs.
Any idea how this could happen?
The spec notes that catalogs are linked with some next-catalog entry, which would
require a new catalog to modify the currently last one. That doesn't sound right.
We have global and user installed packages, too.

Comment 2

[Frans Englich]

  
Hello,  
  
I have some additional information  
  
* KDE have an OASIS XML Catalog implementation which perhaps could be used in  
Mozilla et al. It's written in C++ with stl-like data/container classes(the  
Qt/KDE libraries), synchronous file loading(due to API designs), written  
against a referenced counted DOM implementation(small usages of DOM 3 core), is  
documented, debugged, and licensed under GNU LGPL. sloccount says it's about  
2500 lines of code. I can't tell whether integration work would be more than  
writing a stack from scratch, but it's far from impossible. The implementation  
can be found in:  
  
http://webcvs.kde.org/kdenonbeta/kdom/catalog/  
  
* In relation to KDE's implementation, was a test suite brought into the light.  
It is quite good, and has currently 42 tests. Licensed under MIT license. It  
can be found at:  
  
http://webcvs.kde.org/kdenonbeta/kdom/catalog/  
  
  
I'm author and maintainer of the implementation, and co-author and maintainer  
of the test suite, so feel free to contact me.  
  
  
Cheers,  
  
       Frans 
 
 

Comment 3

[Léa Gris]

:annevk would have been good having a short description why it is Resolution: --- → WONTFIX.

As a wild guess:
- 16 years ago when this issue was created, XML had all the hype attention. Now-a-days, external entities or catalog external references may expose more security risks than services anyone needs.
- So gone remote XUL and high risk.

No regret. Tech moves-on.

Comment 4

[Anne (:annevk)]

Yeah, there's basically no interest to invest further in XML-based technologies, other than moving what we already expose to the web to Rust, for added safety.