Re: Liaison statement on fragment identifiers from Linking WG

Dear XML Linking group,

There doesn't seem to have been a response to my reply from a week
ago, so I am resending it.

This issue is the last one holding up the final release of XHTML, so
we would like to resolve it as soon as possible.

By the way, in my original message there was a typo on my behalf: I
said "NAME is of type NAME", where I meant that is is of type Name
Token, but I guess you realised that.

Best wishes,

Steven Pemberton,
Chair, W3C HTML WG

Steven Pemberton writes:

 > Just for the sake of completeness let me reiterate the HTML WG's
 > position:
 > 
 > 	We want as much as possible to be a 'normal' XML application,
 > 	and follow as far as possible existing W3C recommendations.
 > 
 > 	We want to offer some short-term transition aids.
 > 
 > The current feeling of the group is to make ID of type ID, and NAME of 
 > type NAME (it almost sounds too good to be true), and to say, (using
 > Dan Connolly's words):
 > 
 > 	if your A NAME attribute values are XML names, you win,
 > 		i.e. you can translate to XHTML without pain.
 > 	else, you lose. Sorry.
 > 
 > Further we add the following stipulation:
 > 
 > 	If you use 'name' on an 'a' element, there must be an 'id' on
 > 	the element with the identical value.
 > 
 > We assign no semantics to the 'name' attribute, and it is only there
 > for the transition period, and will be removed (not just deprecated)
 > in the next version of XHTML (which will not have the backwards
 > compatibility requirement).
 > 
 > Objection:
 > 
 > 	Some links from existing documents into XMLised versions of
 > 	existing HTML documents which bear the same URL as the old
 > 	version, will not be properly processed (since they use CDATA
 > 	characters in the fragment identifier).
 > 
 > Answer 1: This is a result of the (external to the HTML WG) decision
 > 	to use IDs as fragment identifiers, and even if we decided to
 > 	drop NAME immediately would still exist as a problem.
 > 
 > Answer 2: User agents would just display the beginning of the document 
 > 	rather than the referred-to fragment, so it is not fatal.
 > 
 > Answer 3: In fact, this may even be seen as an advantage, since now
 > 	people can't write 
 > 
 > 		<a name="root()">
 > 
 > 	anymore, giving us a transition period to Xpointer.
 > 
 > I hope that the various XML groups will be able to live with this
 > solution.
 > 
 > Best wishes,
 > 
 > Steven Pemberton
 > Chair, W3C HTML WG
 >

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 1999 08:56:36 UTC