Is Dedicated Hosting for Critical DTDs Necessary?

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?"

Comments

Re:DTD?

[x_MeRLiN_x]

Document Type Definition

Re:Centralization

[Bogtha]

There needs to be a way to refer to decentralized internet resources in a unique fashion. We need the equivalent of the URL for a file that is hosted simultaneously in many places.

This is known as a URN. URLs and URNs are together known as URIs.

Re:Don't use them

[Skreems]

Exactly. The only point of having a URL associated with a DTD is to assure a unique identifier for each one. It wasn't worth starting a group specifically to regulate DTD identifiers, so they hooked it to a system that's already regulated. Yeah, it's nice to have the DTD live at that location, so if you get a file with a reference to an unfamiliar DTD you can pull it down on the spot, but it shouldn't be required.