- From: Jon Bosak <bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>
- Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 18:26:22 -0800
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
- CC: bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
If I can find time over the weekend I will (with my Chairman hat off and my Sun Representative hat on) describe the application of FPIs that we are putting in place at Sun for managing links in Solaris documentation, and then you will see why I agree strongly with Ken Holman that FPIs are something that we should have in XML. For the moment, however, I would like to go slightly beyond Ken's position by quibbling with this statement from his excellent post on the subject: | FPI's that begin "-//" are unregisterable and can _never_ be guaranteed | to be unique. This may be true from the wording of the standards, but I maintain that it's not actually the case in practice. For example, we are adopting the convention for SunSoft documents that they are all assigned unique FPIs that begin "-//SUN::SUNSOFT//..." The standards may not guarantee you that such an identifier is unique, but Sun can guarantee you a couple of other things: 1. Our document check-in system will not allow two documents to be created with the same FPI, and 2. If you start creating FPIs that begin "-//SUN::SUNSOFT" then you can count on spending the next few years of your life in court with our trademark lawyers. So in reality, even unregistered FPIs can function as unique and persistent names. Jon
Received on Wednesday, 27 November 1996 21:28:32 UTC