[Bug 11427] should allow use of xml:id for XHTML5

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11427

--- Comment #3 from brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> 2010-11-29 16:39:56 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> Note this would presumably also affect mathml in xhtml.
> 
> MathML2 specifies id as does MathMl3. (Some drafts of MathML3 switched to using
> xml:id in preference but in the end, backwards compatibility and feedback from
> implementers in browsers and elsewhere caused us to stick with id.
> 
> Not insisting on <!DOCTYPE syntax in the serialization is a good thing, but
> can't you assume in the spec (and implement in your atom pipeline) a catalog
> that defaults a dtd or schema that implies the IDness of the id attribute?

No.  I've never seen a piece of code that does that, unless it has special
defaults for HTML (in the non-XML serialization).  Xalan and Xerces, two very
popular XML tools, don't handle that.  (Fixing that requires patching the
source.)  And since the Atom is autogenerated (as is the XHTML), it cannot
include an internal DTD subset.  Even if I could do this, it makes every user
and toolchain have to work around it when the solution is easy and
well-specified.  xml:id is intended to handle specifically this case, so people
don't have to play guess-the-attribute (and it's a Recommendation).

It looks like, from <http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/HTML_vs._XHTML>, that this is
intended to be allowed, but it's just not codified.  I'm okay with language
that prohibits both of them from being used together, but without xml:id, XML
tools that work on IDs won't work without a DTD.  I think allowing xml:id is
the better solution here.

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Received on Monday, 29 November 2010 16:39:58 UTC