1.1 WD Comment on autogenerated property IDs.

Editors:

I previously wrote [1] on the issue of autogenerated property ID's a few 
months back.  I have an additional comment on this topic and a change to 
my previous suggestion:

A search on <idref> within the 1.1 WD gives only two defined uses of the 
ID property:

1.) as the internal_destination for an fo:basic-link.
2.) as the ref_id for an fo:page-number-citation.

If this is correct, then given that both defined uses for the property 
ID require the user to have advance knowledge of what the ID value is, 
the value of subsequently autogenerated ID's for FO's remains unclear.  
OTOH, if autogeneration is primarily for internal processing of the 
document, that would appear to be an implementation detail that doesn't 
need to be placed in the recommendation.  (FOP, for example, currently 
does not need such an autogenerated ID, and shouldn't be required to 
generate one.)

Rather than use my previous suggestion of "none" for initial values, 
however, I have a new suggestion for the "initial value" requirement for 
the id property [2] that may give the most flexibility to XSL implementors:

Change from:

"An identifier unique within all objects in the result tree with the fo: 
namespace. [...] The initial value of this property is [a]* random and 
unique identifier. The algorithm to generate this identifier is 
system-dependent."

(* fix typo)

to something like:

"An identifier that must be unique for all formatting objects for which 
it has been specified.  [...]  Initial values, if any, of this property 
are implementation-dependent."

Thanks,
Glen Mazza
Apache FOP Team

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xsl-editors/2004AprJun/0018.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xsl11-20031217/#id

Received on Saturday, 21 August 2004 15:09:09 UTC