Re: 4. ID assignment and the empty string

/ Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> was heard to say:
[...]
|> | Thus I disagree with this resolution.
|> 
|> Does the observation that the problem already exists persuade you to 
|> withdraw your objection?
|
| The change to step 2 above satisfies half of my comment, but as I do not 
| see how the problem exists already (that is, I don't see how XML requires 
| the empty string to be treated as the element's ID), I am not satisfied 
| that the second half of my issue is resolved.
|
| While I agree that existing specifications (XML, DOM, HTML, etc) are vague 
| about how empty string IDs should be handled, current practice is to not 
| normalise IDs at all, and to consider empty strings to not be IDs. While I 
| do not mind the normalisation step for ID procesing (as this is a new 
| attribute, the processing can be defined to normalise -- so long as the 
| DOM representation doesn't differ between new and old implementations!), I 
| firmly believe that the empty string should never be required to be 
| treated as an ID. Since you already consider it an error condition, you 
| presumably agree -- it is merely the next step that I am asking for, 
| namely, explicitly stating that empty strings should not trigger ID 
| processing even if errors are otherwise being ignored.

The Core WG reviewed this issue once again and stands by their
earlier resolution.

From the minutes[1] of the 26 Jan telcon:

ID assignment and the empty string
----------------------------------
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-core-wg/2005Jan/0051
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-id/2005Jan/0024

Richard just replied at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-id/2005Jan/0054

We don't want to make the empty string magic.
We want xml:id="" to behave analogously to
how id="" (where id is declared ID) behaves.

Note that, per the Infoset spec, the [attribute type] 
property in the infoset is set to the declared type 
regardless of the validity of the value.  This is 
already true for attributes declared of type id,
so our proposed behavior for xml:id matches that
already the case for declared ids.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-core-wg/2005Jan/0065.html

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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