Re: [CSS21] Please endorse xml:id

* Christoph Päper wrote:
>If an application, that applies CSS onto XML, does not support 'xml:id',
>there is no need on the behalf of CSS to require anything more from it
>than it currently does.

Norman's point is that XML+CSS user agent developers might miss that
there is an xml:id specification or that they might miss the point of
supporting it in their user agent; users apparently want such user
agents to support xml:id, but they either fail to communicate this to
the developers or the developers ignore the feedback; so adding notes
or even conformance requirements for xml:id support in such user agents
might make it more likely that developers implement xml:id sooner.

There is also the idea that including such a requirement in CSS 2.1
would yield in the feature beeing tested in the CSS 2.1 test suite.
Norman did not make this point, but others did when this issue came
up last time. Clearly, someone should develop such integration tests,
whether the XML Core WG, the CSS WG, or some other party should do it
is not clear to me though.

I seriously doubt that lack of the proposed requirement in CSS 2.1
has considerable impact on xml:id adoption and think the community
is better served with a more general purpose document on low-level
requirements for XML-enabled user agents, or an official guide that
explains which implementations should consider implementation of
additional related specifications.

Note that such co-implementation requirements are often ignored or
overridden by other specifications, for example, XML 1.0 requires
support for UTF-16 yet specifications for XML-based formats licence
implementations to reject UTF-16 documents, or SVG 1.1 requires that
user agents must support SVG wherever complete images may be used,
yet support for SVG in CSS 'background-image' or HTML <img> is quite
limited.
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Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 21:34:12 UTC