xdg Digest, Vol 16, Issue 34

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 01:36 +0200, Timo Stülten wrote:
> > On 7/25/05, Christopher James Lahey <clahey at ximian.com> wrote:
> > > Does anyone have any suggestions for how to proceed here?  I want to
> > > make the mime system detect docbook, since there is a mime type for it.
> 
> > > > Alternatively, is it possible to specify an empty namespace and just
> > > > specify the localname?  That way any xml docs that match as <article>
> > > > or <book> would just be labeled as docbook.
> A lot of docbook files on my system only have <chapter>s in them. They do not 
> have a DOCTYPE, nor any URI. 
> Without a proper DOCTYPE/URI, there is no clean way to recognize them by 
> content as <article> and <chapter> are not very specific to docbook I think. 
> May be it's better to simply use a unique file extension (=".docbook")? All 
> chapter-files on my system here already end in ".docbook".

Right. Without proper definition of what the XML file is, there is no
clean way to tell what the XML file is. Therefore, it should just be
identified as XML, if the file extension is ".xml", and the type of
XML in the file contents is not easily identifiable. I've also seen
the extension ".dbk" used for docbook files. So, falling back to also
using those extensions as matches, seems viable to me.

However, we are not Windows, and should not rely solely on file
extensions to assume content. Whatever application is writing out
those "incomplete" docbook files, should probably be fixed to do the
right thing, and write out a correct DOCTYPE and have proper reference
to the DTD or namespaces being used, so that we can improve the accuracy
of content type detection.

-- dobey