Re: *Major* problem with xml:id in canonical XML

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 03:39:13PM -0500, Paul Grosso wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what I think just yet, but one thing to
> point out is that no one can be using xml:id at this
> time since all names starting with "xml:" are reserved.
> 
> I understand there are legacy implementations of the 
> canonicalization code that might do the wrong thing if 
> they came across xml:id, but there can't be any legacy 
> documents out there using xml:id. 
> 
> In a sense, existing canonicalization code doesn't 
> recognize xml:id because to date it didn't exist.
> 
> The canonicalization spec--and implementations based
> on it--will have to be revised to support xml:id, and
> when they are so revised, they'll have to support xml:id
> properly.

  This work if the layer doing the xml:id support is the
same as the one doing c14n. If they are different modules
you can't garantee the synchronicity of the updates. 

> In the interim, people using existing canonicalization
> code that hasn't been revised to support xml:id might
> get reasonable results or might not, but that's just
> what happens when your tool set is part new (with xml:id
> awareness) and part old (pre-xml:id existence).  While
> it might have been better design for canonicalization
> to have different default behavior for use of names in
> the xml namespace, no single default can always solve 
> the problem of doing the right thing with an element 
> that doesn't yet exist.

  Canonical XML 1.0 wen to REC 15 March 2001, XML Base was
27 June 2001, maybe they used that very open sentence to avoid
frozing in their spec the xml:base name while this wasn't
a REC yet. Not sure it's completely their fault :-), still
this is a serious problem Canonical XML should be revised in
some ways to fix this.

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 Monday, 24 January 2005 21:57:27 UTC