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

On Dec 23, 2005, at 7:33 AM, Geoffrey M Clemm wrote:

>
> Lisa wrote on 12/23/2005 09:42:01 AM:
>
>  > Wilfredo points out something I hadn't considered before, which I 
> think
>  > addresses your concern, Geoff -- the idea that the only agents that
>  > need to preserve prefixes are those that want to.
>
> My point below was that this is precisely what an agent cannot do
> (if by "agent", you mean an individual client).  One agent cannot
> decide to preserve prefixes by escaping the XML for a given
> property value, unless *all* agents have agreed to do so (i.e.,
> unless that property by definition always holds escaped XML text).

That's true, but it's not quite what I was saying.

> >   - Currently we have no known servers or clients that have a need to
>  > preserve prefixes.
>
> I'm not sure who "we" refers to here, but minimally it doesn't include
> us (:-), because we will store XML schema and XSLT data in property 
> values,
> which do require that namespace tags be preserved.  I doubt we're the
> only ones that will do so.

I didn't know about this or missed it.  :)  Good info.

>  >   - If we had a client that decided to do something similar on its 
> local
>  > cache/copy of data, the client would have to get a prefix-preserving
>  > parser and do a bunch of other work too -- but I don't see how the
>  > server behavior would entirely prevent this from working.
>
> What prevents this from working (well) is that it could do so only if 
> all
> other clients that read or wrote this property did so as well.
> This approach is likely to be a source of subtle interoperability 
> problems.

Let's say that
   1.  client X wants to use prefixes and store XML schema and XSLT data 
in property values.
   2.  client Y expects that value to be in ordinary XML, not 
encapsulated.
   3.  server S does not preserve prefixes.

I'm trying to understand here, how does the behavior of Y and S prevent 
X from doing what it wants to do?  Can't client X still store that 
information or at least reconstruct it, if it wants to use prefixes in 
local computations?  It might be messy, but it ought to be possible to 
preserve the original mappings somewhere the server won't mess with it 
(e.g. add an attribute 'originalmapping:x="http://example.com/ns"').  
Knowing how existing servers tend not to preserve prefixes anyway, I'd 
imagine this is what client X would have to do regardless, in order to 
work.

But there could well be something I'm missing here so I'm happy to be 
educated.

Thanks,
Lisa