Re: XML:ID extension spec proposal to HTML5 documents

On 05/02/2014 06:36, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> Btw: If instead of a xml:id, one made a XHTML5 DTD that took care of
>  the ID type assignment, then we would avoid becoming valid in HTML
> (on one side), yet still be back-compatible with legacy XML tools
> (on the other side).

Any of the "legacy" DTD allowed by HTML5 will do that already for
existing HTML4 elements. That would cover the vast majority of documents
that you want to id.
It's unfortunate that there isn't a Public identifier for a sane
non-legacy DTD (but as you know there is an extension spec for that)

but whatever identifier you use then it's fairly trivial to have a
catalog ad a local DTD that declares any id attributes you need to be of
type ID when used with an XML parser.

So I don't see any need to use xml:id. In fact I'd go further and say
that xml:id was a well intentioned idea but it causes more problems than
it solves on the XML side (there is basically no resolution to the
problem that it clashes with DTD defined ID) (We looked at using it with
MathML for example and there was no basically way to make it work given
that we had an existing id attribute). Given that I view xml:id as a
failed experiment for XML I can't see how I could support inflicting the
same problems on HTML.

David


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Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 09:40:24 UTC