Occurences of <rules> element in document and linking

Hi everyone,

Piggy-backing on some time left at the end of the editors' teleconference today, Christian, Felix and I were able to discuss of the
"Shall ITS allows several <rules> elements in a single document?" question as well as the "What the ITS xlink:href link points to
exactly?" question, that were generated from the Versionning discussion.
And we even reached a consensus that hopefully you will share:

We propose that:

-#1- Only one <rules> element should be allowed per document. We think it covers most of the cases, and allowing more than one would
result in quite a few headaches in processing/conformance while not adding much benefits.

This is a change from the current specification insofar as we didn't have any explicit wording forbidding several <rules> to be in a
single file (and therefore it was implicitely allowed).


-#2- The xlink:href attributes of the <rules> element points to an arbitrary XML document that contains a <rules> element. That
element can be the root element or elsewhere in the document (and there is only one per #1).

This is a clarification of the linking mechanism rather than a change. The next updated specification should include a section
describing the linking mechanism as we agreed already.


If you see any problem with either #1 or #2 please make sure to post your comments.

Cheers,
P.S. The discussion on versionning is still going on:
See this thread:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-its/2006AprJun/0015.html