Have you ever used the DocBook DTDs (or XSDs) and been blocked by the oasis-open.org website after a handful of accesses to them? If so, here's how to work around this problem. Granted, the solution I offer is specifically for Mac OS X, as long as you can run a webserver on your operating system, the same solution will still work (after all, Mac OS X is really just BSD Unix).
While working on the ActiveMQ In Action book, we were originally using the DocBook 4.5 DTD directly from the oasis-open.org website. Every time I built the book to transform the DocBook XML into PDFs, the Maven build would access the DTDs directly. Pretty standard stuff when the DTDs are not already packaged in a JAR so that they can be accessed locally. I wasn't happy with build ing needing to grab these DTDs for every iteration, but since I have a fast connection it wasn't a big deal for me. However, after a very short period of time, the oasis-open.org website blocked me from accessing the DTDs. This was a pain because it caused the build to fail. To work around this problem, here's what I did.
I simply downloaded the DTDs and related files that I needed, put the DTD and friends in /Library/WebServer/Documents/docbook/xml/4.5/ directory on my local hard drive and added the following entry to the /etc/hosts file so that any requests to oasis-open.org to point to my local machine:
127.0.0.1 www.oasis-open.org
Then I just started up web sharing on the MacBook Pro I used to work on the book and voila! I no longer had to access the DTDs online anymore and the fact that oasis-open.org blocked my IP address didn't matter anymore.
This really wasn't a big deal for me, but I question the motive for making the DTDs publicly available and HTTP accessible if there are rules for accessing them. Why not post work arounds such as this to the oasis-open.org site? Why not just simply post a page of rules for accessing them? Of course, these items may be posted somewhere and I just wasn't able to find them. If so, that's a problem as well. Hint! Hint!
