Re: Minutes for XML Core WG telcon of 2011 August 10

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 12:18:59PM -0400, Grosso, Paul wrote:
> > Extending XInclude
> > ------------------
> > Norm sent email on behalf of DocBook at
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-core-wg/2011Jul/0013
> > asking whether we want to consider extending Xinclude.
> > 
> 
> The key issue is that xincluding content can often cause
> duplicate ids, and the question is whether we can define
> some kind of fix up.
> 
> Henry is skeptical about id fixup, and he considers IDs
> as obsolete technology.
> 
> Norm doesn't see how scoped identifiers solves his problem.
> See http://docbook.org/docs/transclusion-requirements/#uc-5
> for a use case.
> 
> If we provide some kind of id fixup on xinclude, we could
> provide some solutions to some use cases.
> 
> See http://www.docbook.org/docs/transclusion/#d6e180 for
> some DocBook proposals for id fixup.
> 
> We'll plan to think about this some and revisit.

  I think adding a prefix for XIncluded ID is not hard, but
that will break nonetheless because the referencing documents are
unlikely to understand that the ID changed. Allocating those
ID prefixes would be yet another headache.
  So between the trouble of getting the XInclude implementations
to support it (and how to detect/handle if not) and the fact that
the referencing document will need to learn the new IDs anyway
(i.e. it get simpler to fix IDs on the chunk(s) rather than at
XInclude time).

  Basically the problem of clashing IDs has to be solved globally
anyway for the universe of the involved documents pieces and
propagated to the (likely larger) set of referencing documents.

  Which is somehow why I agree with Henry on thinking IDs are
outdated, they can't scale and require centralized knowledge.
Of course an XPointer based on a logical path is a far better
alternative but I'm not gonna go there again !


  In a nutshell, this would be a localized solution, but
that still doesn't really scale, and there is a non-trivial
deployment problem in my opinion.

Daniel

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Received on Thursday, 11 August 2011 10:30:51 UTC