[Bug 5772] ID value types too restrictive and inflexible for some use cases

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=5772


Rob Burns <rob@robburns.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|NEEDSINFO                   |




--- Comment #9 from Rob Burns <rob@robburns.com>  2008-06-22 08:37:55 ---
(In reply to comment #8 and comment #1)
> So to confirm, you are just requesting that the restriction on ID attributes
> that they have a document-unique value be removed? Or is there more to the
> request?

> I asked if you wanted that and you said no. I think Lachlan's comments are
> pretty reasonable, and argue pretty convincingly against anything that would
> result in making duplicate IDs allowed would be bad (certainly as an author I'd
> hate it if the validator didn't tell me about duplicate IDs in the spec).

I got thrown by your use of all caps ("ID") which by convention usually refers
to the data type rather than an attribute name. What I'm suggesting is we
should maintain the ID data type as is, but use that with an xml:id attribute.
For the id attribute we would perhaps relax the allowable characters (if we
thought that necessary), but mostly restrict uniqueness to siblings of the same
parent. This means that as an author you could still make use of document-wide
unique IDs or even document wide unique id attributes if you chose to do so.
However for authors who felt id persistence was more important than you or
Lachlaun apparently feel it is, they could make use of more persistent ids
unique only among siblings. As you know Henri only added duplicate id checking
to his validator (the one you use) after I riased this issue. Duplicate id
checking is quite rare (Henri may be the first to do so in a mainstream
conformance checker)

> I don't understand what problem it is you want to solve. To be honest I can't
> be more specific because there are hardly two sentences you've written in this
> bug so far that I can understand.

Well, I don't know how to respond to that. Perhaps you could point to the parts
you think you do understand. Frankly, I would expect someone who has been
involved with specs as long as you have to follow this thread better. I'm
prepared to take the blame for that, but you need to give me some indication of
where I need to further explain things.

As for Lachlauns response, it failed to make a cogent counter-argument to any
of the issues raised in this bug.


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Received on Sunday, 22 June 2008 08:38:32 UTC