The value space of XMLLiteral (was: Re: XML literals poll)

Hi Gavin,

Thanks for the comments! A comment and question below.

On 21 Nov 2011, at 19:44, Gavin Carothers wrote:
>> Q1. Should the specs define a way to compare XML literals based on value?
>> 
>> In other words, in the same way that integers 7 and 007 have the same value, should <foo/> and <foo></foo> be defined as having the same value?
> 
> No. The value space of an XML fragment or document is far too complex
> for our WG to deal with (schema annotation, DTD parse additions,
> white-space rules, etc). There are too many special cases, and too
> little value. XPath and XQuery stop short of doing this, that should
> be a hint to us.

I note that RDF 2004 does this already, and it doesn't look too complex – they just referred to Exclusive XML Canonicalization spec:
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-concepts/index.html#XMLLiteral-lexical-space

(This is a link to the lexical space definition – the value space is 1:1 with the lexical space in the 2004 design.)

Saying that the value space is an XML infoset doesn't seem to be too complicated. I believe there is a 1:1 relationship between canonicalized XML documents and XML infosets:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/

So, in terms of handling all the special cases and so on, isn't this a solved problem?

Best,
Richard

Received on Wednesday, 23 November 2011 22:24:59 UTC