- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:22:12 -0400
- To: "Bassetti, Ann" <ann.bassetti@boeing.com>
- CC: public-xml-id@w3.org, "Bugbee, Larry" <larry.bugbee@boeing.com>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>, Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>, "Reid, Travis S" <travis.s.reid@boeing.com>, "Gerstmann, Jerry P" <jerry.p.gerstmann@boeing.com>, "Meadows, Joe" <joe.meadows@nobs.ca.boeing.com>
Henry Thompson writes, "Speaking for myself, the parallelism with the existing xml: attributes is compelling -- using xmlid will simply confuse people because they will look for some deep significance in the shift from xml:" but I think this is backwards. xml:id is in fact not parallel to xml:space and xml:lang. It has different inheritance behavior, and therefore should not be treated the same. There is significance to the shift from xml:id to xmlid, and no one has to look too deeply to find it. xmlid was chosen over xml:id (or should be chosen) simply because it is qualitatively different from xml:space and xml:lang. It applies to a single element rather than that element's entire subtree. What the Boeing folks have pointed out (that xmlid is much easier to handle in namespace-aware processors than xml:id because it doesn't require any special casing) is yet another reason to prefer xmlid to xml:id. The only reason to use xml:id is an adamant belief that all names should have colons in them. Namespaces have long since been recognized as an ungodly mess and an ugly kludge. It's well past time we stopped enforcing that kludge on every new spec despite very good reasons to go down a different path. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
Received on Friday, 22 April 2005 20:22:18 UTC