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Is Dedicated Hosting for Critical DTDs Necessary?

Posted by Cliff on from the might-the-W3C-be-interested dept.

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?"

9 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. I know! by Colin+Smith · · Score: 4, Funny

    ICANN!

    Mhahahahaha. Yeah. I know, I crack myself up.

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    Deleted
    1. Re:I know! by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Funny

      ICANN!

      Mhahahahaha. Yeah. I know, I crack myself up.

      No you cann't!
  2. Re:w3c by JordanL · · Score: 4, Funny

    There's no better place to keep the standards related to the web.
    Some say that wistfully, others begrudgingly.
    --
    FanFictionRecs.net
  3. Re:DTD? by Sporkinum · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's the sound Carlos Mencia makes...

    --
    "He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
  4. sure there is! by commodoresloat · · Score: 2, Funny

    What's wrong with this website?

  5. I have a server in my basement we could use. by fyoder · · Score: 4, Funny

    Linux box with an uptime of 153 days. It does have to go down now and again so I can clean the dust and cat fur out of it, but that doesn't take too long.

    --
    Loose lips lose spit.
    1. Re:I have a server in my basement we could use. by Skapare · · Score: 2, Funny

      I have an old Sun Sparc 5/70 that still works. Rock solid machine and has OpenBSD loaded on it. I even have a static IP address on my dialup service I could put it on.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  6. DTDs, XML entities and the non-breaking space by Darkforge · · Score: 3, Funny

    Unfortunately, DTDs aren't just for validation... they're also the only good way to define "entities" (e.g. "&foo;") in XML. This comes up a lot when trying to put HTML in XML feeds, because HTML has a lot of entities that aren't in the XML spec. Specifically, you may notice that you can't type " " in ordinary XML.

    It's trivial to define "&nbsp;" yourself in a DTD, (<!ENTITY nbsp "&#a0;">) and many of the standard DTDs out there do define it, but by the XML 1.0 standard it's got to be defined somewhere or else the XML won't parse.

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  7. Re:Call me crazy... by Nimey · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's not like someone would update it, and then give it the old version number.


    Your trust in the world is cute. :-)
    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem