Xinclude word-smithing

Summary:
Two minor suggested editorial corrections to better reflect WG position
on #faithful-infoset w.r.t XInclude, partial response to comment DBooth3.


Issuette:
It does not appear that XInclude rec licenses the arbitrary expansion of
xinclude elements. The GRDDL documents, particularly the #xinclude test,
can be read as suggesting that it does.

My understanding is the the GRDDL WG position is that GRDDL is neutral
with respect to such XML preprocessing, e.g. a GRDDL aware agent may
process an XPath nodeset before or after xinclude processing, and the
issue of whether to perform such processing is deferred to XProc WG and
to the TAG.

To better reflect this, I suggest the sentence:

"Whether or not processing of XInclude, XML Validity, XML Schema
Validity, XML Signatures or XML Decryption take place is
implementation-defined"

be changed to

"Whether or not processing of XInclude, XML Validity, XML Schema
Validity, XML Signatures or XML Decryption take place is as defined in
other recommendations and by implementation-specific behaviour"

And that the description of the test #xinclude is changed:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/td/grddl-tests#xinclude

"the XML Processor of the GRDDL implementation supports XInclude"

to

"the XML Processor of the GRDDL implementation performs preprocessing
following XInclude"

and an additional sentence, perhaps at the end of the test description,
after the picture.

"This test is not intended to suggest that such XInclude processing
should be performed in this case, if no such processing is performed,
then the following test applies."

====

The last sentence reflects the opinion of various HP engineers I have
chatted with, that in this case XInclude processing is not licensed by
any recommendation, and, while, it may be legitimized by explicit user
invocation of XInclude, in general, we do not think it should be
encouraged.
There is clearly no need to convince the WG of that opinion, since the
WG has already decided not to have an opinion to defer to other specs - 
however, the additional sentence makes that stance clearer, and leaves 
the reader to make up their own mind as to what the other specs do or do 
not permit/require/prohibit.

I doubt very much that David is happy with these changes, but I believe 
that it is a (very small) positive step in response to his comments.

Jeremy






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Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 13:09:16 UTC