I thought www-html would be the best place to initially mention the idea.
Essentially the registry would do for SGML catalogs what DNS did for host
tables. Root servers would contain lists of public text owners with
mappings to that owner's catalogue. For example, the root servers would
know where to go to find public text owned by IETF. The IETF would then
have a server that would do a mapping from DTD HTML 2.0 or whatever to a
URL that contained the public text.
The results could be returned to the querying browser which would treat the
URL as a system identifier (like Panorama and nsgmls).
The relationship between this scheme and ISO 9070 would of course need to
be discussed.
What do people think?
James K. Tauber <jtauber@ucs.uwa.edu.au>
Programmer and CWIS Officer
University Computing Services
University of Western Australia