Re: Options for dealing with IDs

At 16:51 2003 01 10 +0100, Chris Lilley wrote:
>the number of applications that need to know IDness is very large, so
>requiring them to fetch an external DTD is to heavy and requiring all
>instances to start with a substantial internal subset of 60 or so
><!ATTLIST foo ID #IMPLIED> for all values of foo is also too heavy.

You mean (something like) <!ATTLIST foo id ID #IMPLIED>.


>What is needed is a simple and lightweight method of determining
>IDness for well-formed instances. Making it upwards compatible when
>either of DTD or Schema validation (or both) is then performed, is
>clearly desirable for interoperability.


Though I don't know how I feel about this, I believe there is a
variant that isn't included in any of your previous scenarios, Chris.

XML could pick up the #ALL capability defined five years ago in the 
SGML TC2 [1] that allows a declaration of the form:

  <!ATTLIST #ALL id ID #IMPLIED>

in the internal subset to add an 'id' attribute of type ID to all elements.

paul

[1] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/document/1955.htm section K.4.4 Attribute definitions

Received on Friday, 10 January 2003 11:11:47 UTC