Re: Xpointer

On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Nick Kew wrote:

>Charles, have you been looking at my new EARL[1] stuff, or are we just
>thinking in parallel?

Nothing parallel about it. I'm shamelessly following on from your ideas.

>
>It is indeed possible for a tool to generate its own IDs for every
>node in a DOM, and use these internally to reference them.  An EARL
>tool can also export them, provided it makes available the IDs themselves
>(as in my latest tool[1]) and/or machine-readable instructions for
>reconsructing them as previously discussed ([2], etc).  The former
>simplifies a document snapshot, whereas the latter is still
>necessary if we want rubustness across document changes.

I'm looking at the simple case where an Xpointer constructed by counting
elements or something points to a thing with an ID already. (if the tool
constructs an ID it is not certain that other tools will have this available
to refer to without having an agreed way of assigning ID, and that gets
circular...)

IDs are normally the most robust things over changes. So an Xpointer tool
could check for an ID and ask if there was any reason not to use it...

Chaals

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 01:18:26 UTC