This has been brought up before, but a recent test case raised by Jonathan Marsh indicated that the problem was worse than I had thought. An XPointer without an href part can point iunto the same document. For exxample, <root> <element id="bar"/> <xi:include xpointer="bar"/> </root> Since XPointers can point forwards and backwards this means that even a minimally conforming implementation has to keep the entire document in memory until it has been completely processed. Furthermore, even a tree-based implementation can't modify a document in place because it may need to resolve XPointers that refer to the original, unmodified document. As an implemennter, I see no plausible way to handle XPointers in SAX, and even in tree-based APIs like XOM (and presumably other tree-based APIs) it's very tough. XPointers are an implementation dependance conformance issue to start with because some implementations support the xpointer scheme, some don't, and some support it partially. However, a lot of use cases don't require XPointers at all. I wonder if it would be better if they were removed completely? -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitAReceived on Monday, 26 January 2004 11:55:57 GMT
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