Re: Comments on the WOFF Last Call

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:09 AM, Stephen Zilles <szilles@adobe.com> wrote:
> 2.       In the uniqueid element in the Metadata section, there is a note:”
> The id attribute of the uniqueid element, and of several further metadata
> elements defined below, is not required to conform to the rules for the XML
> type ID; its form is at the discretion of the font creator or vendor.” It
> does not seem appropriate for a W3C spec to advocate violation of XML well
> formedness, especially since the uniqueid element is empty and could contain
> the unique ID as its value. Also, the conformance requirement summary for
> Metadata says, “The decompressed data MUST be well-formed XML.”

Well-formedness does not require that id's match XML's Name
production.  A generic XML processor doesn't even know whether a given
attribute is supposed to contain an id or not; the attribute name "id"
has no special meaning in XML.  If a DTD were provided for the WOFF
metadata format, it would want to declare the id attribute to be of
type CDATA, not ID -- but that would still be only a validity issue,
not a well-formedness issue.

Note that XHTML5 also doesn't require its id attribute to match XML's
Name production.