[Bug 4450] indistinguishable annotations?

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4450

           Summary: indistinguishable annotations?
           Product: XML Schema
           Version: 1.0/1.1 both
          Platform: Macintosh
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: SCDS: XML Schema Component Designators
        AssignedTo: holstege@mathling.com
        ReportedBy: cmsmcq@w3.org
         QAContact: www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org


Section 4.2.10 says in part:

    Annotations cannot be individually addressed: they 
    can only be accessed through wildcarding. Annotation 
    components therefore do not have individually distinguishable 
    canonical schema component paths or designators.

I believe this is true for XSD 1.0, but in XSD 1.1 I thought
the rationale for changing annotations from being sets to
being sequences was precisely (or at least in part) to enable
SCDs to use numeric positional predicates to distinguish them,
so that one could write annotation::*[2] to pick up the 
second one.

Looking at it from this angle, I wonder whether the right answer
to the permanent question "which version of XSD are SCDs to
support?" might be "both -- SCDs should be able to designate
components in either version of XSD, and variations should be
noted where appropriate.  In 4.2.10, for example, the words
just quoted might be preceded by "For XSD 1.0,", and another
sentence or so might be added to say that for XSD 1.1, annotations
are given in sequences, so that predicates may be used to
distinguish them.

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2007 13:29:30 UTC