Re: integration testing of xml:ID

On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 11:11:34PM +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> could you please state whether adding text like
> 
>   If an implementation supports CSS 2.1 and also supports
>   xml:id, then the xml:id attribute must be treated as an
>   ID for the purposes of CSS selector processing.
> 
> to CSS 2.1 would in some way change conformance requirements for
> implementations that support CSS 2.1 and also support xml:id? If
> it does, could you please clarify why and why xml:id does not
> contain a conformance requirement to this effect already?

xml:id is basically a parser feature. I really don't see why it should
add conformance statement for all the specs which may depend on XML.

 "If an implementation supports CSS 2.1"

An implementation of the XML parser layer is independant of the CSS one. I
don't see what it means that an implementation of an XML parser implements
CSS 2.1. At best a program may have an XML parser and a CSS 2.1 implementation
embedded in them. What you are trying to state is an application constraint
not constaint of an XML implementation, I don't think it has its place
in the spec describing the XML implementation. (It's actually confusing
since an application can have an HTML parser, an XML parser and a CSS 2.1
implementation and use CSS only on the output of the HTML parser, the XML
parser being used for something else).

I think your suggestion puts the information at the wrong layer, the person
implementing xml:id will do it generically and usually won't have any way
to transmit that requirement to someone using it in the framework of a
CSS 2.1 implementation. It may make more sense to add that note at the 
CSS level since that layer can be aware of what the underlying parser 
supports and deliver, but not the way around.
To be precise, as libxml2 implementor, and implementor of xml:id
there is no way I can tell anything about it to people who may use it in
an environment where CSS-2.1 is applied. I don't see how I could comply
to that requirement. I don't see either how the people who need to be
aware of it are gonna find it if it is put there.

Daniel

[1] http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/evolution.html

-- 
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 Friday, 10 June 2005 21:43:40 UTC