- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 05:19:15 -0400
- To: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- CC: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, public-xml-id@w3.org
Henry S. Thompson wrote: > Having maintained and developed a large Java XML API for some years, I > agree that the xml namespace and prefix require special casing. That > special casing took work. That work is done. The marginal cost of > supporting xml:id given that the work has been done is tiny. If I were to take the time to produce a list of existing APIs and tools in which that work has not been done, would this convince you to support xmlid instead of xml:id? > The conceptual overhead of explaining that global attributes are > namespace-prefixed, except when they're spelled 'x m l i d', seems to > me _much_ more costly when averaged over all likely users, than the > cost of getting xml: right when averaged over all developers. The conceptual overhead is explaining global attributes, full-stop. Irrespective of any xml: issues, this is one of the things in the W3C Schema language that is consistently confusing and regularly befuddles students. The proper solution for xmlid is simply not to mention or claim any distinction between global and local attributes. The concept is unnecessary and not useful. It is much easier to explain that xmlid and xml:space and xml:lang are reserved attributes that have particular semantics. That's all. -- 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 Tuesday, 26 April 2005 09:19:30 UTC