Re: Change namespace of xml:id

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 04:20:34PM +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> 
> * Norman Walsh wrote:
> >FWIW, I don't. There's a precedent for using xml: (xml:base, xml:lang,
> >xml:space). There's no precedent (that I can think of) for taking advantage
> >of the fact that XML reserves names beginning xml (except maybe
> >xml-stylesheet).
> 
> xmlns.

Well it's the building block for namespaces, sounds a bootstrap issue to me.

> >Except user expectations. I think users would find the unqualified
> >attribute name "xmlid" more confusing than "xml:id".
> 
> Well, lots of authors consider
> 
>   x.setAttributeNS("http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace", "id", ...)
> 
> more difficult than
> 
>   x.setAttributeNS(null, "xmlid", ...)
> 
> or
> 
>   x.setAttribute("xmlid", ...)
> 
> Evidence can easily be found on any forum that involves namespace
> discussions.

  I don't think using a non-namespaced attribute for what we want to
do would be accepted within W3C. And using a namespace different than
the XML one would also raise serious problems IMHO. We got lot of flack
when doing XML Base, but nobody complained that adding the xml: prefix
was too hard for authors, either in the design phase nor since it's a REC.
I would expect xml:id (like xml:base) to be in tool generated anyway in
most cases like with XSLT generate-id(), generating unicity is best done
by machines.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard@redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2005 15:41:12 UTC