Re: XML Core WG Status and Open Actions as of 2006 October 16

> > It seems a bit strange to say the people SHOULD NOT use a value just
> > because it's useless.  And xml:base="foo" is just as useless.  But it
> > might be a good idea to add a note that some implementations implement
> > this incorrectly, so it should (lower-case) be avoided.

> The intention was to NOT RECOMMENDED xml:base aware applications to use 
> of xml:base="", xml:base="#fragment", xml:base="foo" or 
> xml:base="bar/../" and the like becuase their interpretation - as turned 
> out in this WG (please recall the discussions about xml:base="" 
> referring to the document root vs. beeing a noop) - is not quite 
> straight forward.

Their interpretation is explicitly stated now.

> So why shouldn't we discourage something that is useless and complicated?

I don't mind discouraging it, in fact the Note I added to

  http://www.w3.org/XML/Group/2006/09/xmlbase-2e/#same-document

says:

  Some existing processors do treat these xml:base values as resetting
  the base URI to that of the containing document, so the use of such
  values is strongly discouraged.

But saying that documents "SHOULD NOT" amounts to saying that they're
not conforming if they do it without a good reason, and I think that's
going too far.

> Further such values are currently not removed by canonicalization as we 
> decided to touch xml:base only iff a fix-up is necessary. Hence 
> document's containing such xml:base attributes are logically equivalent 
> to documents not containing them.

But lots of other documents are logically equivalent.  xml:base="foo"
has no effect on how URIs are resolved.  I don't think that a
sufficient reason.  The reason to discourage xml:base="" and xml:base="#f"
is that there is disagreement among existing processors, and I think
the Note covers that.

-- Richard

Received on Friday, 27 October 2006 12:00:45 UTC