Re: Status of Bugzilla Bug 10, Round-tripping various information in properties

Hm,

Wilfredo's mail didn't arrive here (yet).

Geoffrey M Clemm wrote:
> 
> There were several postings (most recently, one a couple of weeks ago)
> that explained why escaping the XML as #PCDATA has a variety of problems.
> For example:
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2005OctDec/1056.html>
> So until a non-problematic solution is proposed, I stick by my
> preference for a recommendation that servers preserve namespaces
> (namespace preserving parsers are not that hard to come by, so I
> don't see this as an unreasonable recommendation).
> 
> Cheers,
> Geoff
> 
> Wilfredo Sánchez Vega <wsanchez@apple.com> wrote on 12/22/2005 01:12:23 PM:
> 
>  >    For what it's worth, I talked to Greg Stein about this at  
>  > ApacheCon, and his position is that namespaces will not be preserved  
>  > by mod_dav, insofar as they are not semantically meaningful to a  
>  > namespace-aware XML parser.  The presence of other specifications  

Yes, they are. This has been explained numerous time. But anyway:

- there's no W3C spec that would license an XML processor to throw away 
prefixes

- there are multiple W3C specs that use prefixes in attribute values (or 
even text content), including XSLT and XML Schema

So please everybody try to understand the issue before claiming prefixes 
aren't relevant. In *most* cases they aren't. In *some* cases they are.

>  > which add semantic meaning to then doesn't change that.
>  >
>  >    This is basically the position I was taking.
>  >
>  >    I (and I believe Greg) don't think this belongs in the spec, even  
>  > as a SHOULD.  An explicit recommendation that clients sent properties  
>  > as #PCDATA still makes a lot more sense to me.
>  >
>  >    I have yet to hear a reason why serializing the property as  
>  > #PCDATA isn't an acceptable solution for whose who wish to avoid  
>  > forcing the server parse (and therefore interpret) the property value.

A property value serialized as #PCDATA (thus as escaped XML) is 
something else than a property value serialized as XML. If you control 
the format, such as when you define the property in a spec, you sure 
have the freedom to say it's text, instead of XML. But this requires 
that senders and recipients agree on that. But in general, a client 
doesn't have that choice.

Furthermore, putting escaped XML into property values *will* have 
negative effects on generic clients (which will display angle brackets 
to the user) and some protocol extensions (such as DASL).

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 22 December 2005 18:46:31 UTC