issue 168 proposal: xsi:type of external references in Encoding

 Hi all. 8-)
 This is a proposal for resolving issue 168 [1].
 The issue wants to know the XML Schema Instance type of the data
that is referenced by the href attribute and that is external to
the referencing document.

 The proposal:
 The type of referenced data depends on whether the referenced
document is an XML document or not. The possible means of
determining whether a particular document is XML or not include
using MIME types, file extensions or file introspection.
 In case the document is XML, the referenced data is either the
root element or the element identified by its ID (in case the
referencing URL contains the #<id> part), the type of this data
is determined the same way as if the reference was internal.
 In case the document is not XML, the type of the referenced data
is enc:binary, a simple type with the value space of the set of
finite-length sequences of binary octets and the same lexical
space. [guess I'll need somebody's help with this definition]

 A different proposal could try to introduce some means of
otherwise typing the data (for example an attribute
enc:hrefType). To me this seems too complicated.
 Yet another proposal could disallow external references
altogether. This would IMO meet big push back from the proponents
of the current practice of attaching data.

 Anyway, here it is, read for being discussed. 8-)

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)
                   http://www.systinet.com/


[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xmlp-issues.html#x168

Received on Sunday, 9 December 2001 14:05:30 UTC