Unecessary dependence between XPointer and DTD or W3C XML Schema

I'd like to bring the issue of uncessary dependence between W3C specs as
illustrated by XPointer.

I have already ellaborated on xml-dev and www-xml-linking-comments, but
to make it short, XPointer is defining that when I write "foo.xml#bar",
there is no need to specify how to associate "foo.xml" with any schema
(it's up to the application to do so) to determine wich id will be used
but that this schema must be either a DTD or a W3C XML Schema (the list
is norminative).

To me, this dependence between XPointer and DTD or W3C XML Schema is
useless and harmfull.

If we leave the application free to choose any document as a schema, the
fragment identified by "foo.xml#bar" is de facto depending on an
informal agreement between the "client" and the "server" of the fragment
(client and server beeing taken in the liberal sense where the "client"
might be a XHTML page on a server and the "server" might be the browser
in which this page is displaid) and undertermined if such an agreement
is missing.

If we rely on a non specified agreement, what need is there to require
that only a DTD or a W3c XML Schema can be used to express this
agreement?

A "hard coded" agreement that the id is the concatenation of attributes
"id1" and "id2" could work as well, or any other generic or specific way
to define what's the id is...

Beyong the fact that I disagree on this specific case, I think that a
good practice would be to reduce the amount of unecessary dependences
between specs!

To come back to XPointer and without even mentioning that other
organizations might define ways to define IDs, if the W3C needed to
define one for a specific case in 2 years time, this would require a new
edition of XPointer which can easily be avoided by making the list non
normative...

Thanks for your attention,

Eric

See also:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2002OctDec/0021.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2002JulSep/0047.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2002JulSep/0029.html


-- 
Rendez-vous a Paris (Forum XML).
                          http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2002 10:15:19 UTC