XPointer

I made the mistake of reading this specification today.  Allow me to list
the faults:

    1) uses probably the most difficult syntax to parse of all options:
       balanced quotes inside balanced parens with encapsulated functions
       and concatenated schemes;

    2) frequent use of characters that are explicitly disallowed
       in the URI syntax and thus must be escaped;

    3) calls itself a "scheme" and encourages the naming of new "schemes"
       for fragment syntax, in spite of the fact that the URI syntax
       already has something called a scheme; (doesn't anyone have a
       thesaurus?)

    4) focuses on mechanical identification of XML elements (fragile
       and media-type-specific) rather than the content (section heading,
       paragraph number, paragraph text, etc.).

In short, these things are not suitable for use with URIs and should
not be recommended by the W3C.


Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software
                  (roy.fielding@day.com) <http://www.day.com/>

                  Co-founder, The Apache Software Foundation
                  (fielding@apache.org)  <http://www.apache.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 2002 18:04:22 UTC