- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 18:56:55 -0400
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- CC: "Bassetti, Ann" <ann.bassetti@boeing.com>, 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>
Chris Lilley wrote: > I don't hear you calling for rescinding xml:space, xml:base and so the > magic predeclared not remappable namespace code still needs to be in the > parser, right? So re-using it does not seem to cause additional burden. In practice, the special purpose code often is not in the parser/library. Then again sometimes it is. Often it's just left completely unspecified what's supposed to happen. I bring up again the case of //*/xml:space and //*/foo:space when xml is not mapped to http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace and foo is. Even in the case of XML parsing, exactly what sort of error is it when the wrong prefix or wrong namespace URI is used here? Parsers/libraries are extremely inconsistent on these points. Furthermore, many libraries do not need to special case xml:space and xml:lang at all because they do not provide any API calls that reference those characteristics. xml:base is a little trickier because some specs like DOM 3 do indeed have a getBaseURL() call or something similar, but a lot still don't. With xml:id we're moving deeper into territory where libraries actually care about what happens. DOM 2 does have getElementById. SAX can return the type of an attribute so it needs to recognize xml:id at least for that. XPath also has the notion of IDs, as does XPointer's shorthand syntax. xml:lang and xml:space just aren't that relevant most of the time, and xml:base only marginally more so. However, xml:id is diving right into the heart of a lot of XML processing. Any problems that already exist with xml:space, xml:lang, and xml:base are going to have much more practical impact with xml:id. -- 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 22:57:02 UTC