Re: Bugzilla issue 10, was: Plan to resolve issues in 2518bis

Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> That works for me, unless more feedback from implementors comes up quite 
> different.
> 
> Based on Julian's rewriting plus the discussion so far, here's some 
> proposed wording:
> 
> The value of a property appears inside the property name element. The value
> can be any kind of well-formed XML content: element content, text or mixed
> content. When the property value contains element or mixed content,
> namespaces that are in scope for that part of the XML document apply within
> the property value as well, and servers MUST preserve namespaces in server

s/namespaces/namespace names/

> storage for retransmission later. The server MAY preserve namespace 
> prefixes
> and non-significant whitespace.

1. Of course it *may* preserve namespace prefixes. I think this needs to 
be rephrased the other way around: clients MUST NOT rely on prefixes 
being preserved since some servers won't do that.

2. I don't understand the part about non-significant whitespace. Why was 
it introduced, and what issue does that resolve????

> For any values where specific prefix choices or whitespace matter (e.g. 
> property
> values containing XPath with prefixes), clients might need to force the 
> server to
> store the exact property value by encapsulating the value in a CDATA 
> section.

This is a bit misleading as it kind of suggests that this would allow to 
  use mixed or element content while preserving prefixes, which is not 
the case. Using CDATA will just result in the property value being a 
plain string, not tags.

Thus my preference still is to require servers to do the right thing. If 
we don't, the warning needs to be rephrased for example like this:

"Servers are not required to preserve namespace prefixes in property 
content, hence clients should not rely on them being preserved.  If 
preservation of prefixes is required (such as in XPath expressions), 
then it should be considered to use a different format for the value, 
such as plain text containing escaped XML)."

Best regards,

Julian

Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2005 13:21:28 UTC