Re: Options for dealing with IDs

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/ "Steven Pemberton" <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl> was heard to say:
| Not blaming you personally, but your employer must carry much of the blame
| for the course of events. If they had not protested so strongly at an early
| stage about XML applications using the application/xml media type, we would
| never have set up the ietf-xml-mime list, which led to the creation of RFC
| 2376 (XML Media types).

I think there are plenty of folks around that will argue that
application/xml is usually a bad idea. I'm not sure I agree, but I
certainly don't think taking pot shots at my employer is contributing
to the discussion.

|> On the other hand, one of the consequences xml:idAttr (and do a lesser
|> extent xml:id) that bothers me is that it moves this validation
|> semantic out into authoring space. One of the reasons that W3C XML
|> Schema says that schema location information is only a hint is so that
|> I can apply my own schema independent of what the author asked for.
|> Well, what if I want to use some other attribute as an ID sometimes?
|> It just seems to me that moving IDness into the document is a fairly
|> significant can of worms.
|
| Actually xml:id doesn't *necessarily* break this. An attribute called xml:id
| will always be of type ID, but not all attributes of type ID have to be
| called xml:id. So if you want the property you describe above, by all means
| use other names.

Yes, but I can only have one attribute of type ID.

|> If pushed, I think I could come to terms with the simple xml:id
|> proposal, but the more complex variants look like too much complexity
|> to me.
|
| One of the reasons I prefer xml:id is that it works with current software:
| just add it to the DTD and go (if the processor doesn't read the DTD it
| needs built-in knowledge of the ID attributes anyway), and it doesn't get in
| the way of composibility (which an attribute on the root element does).

Yep, good points.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | A man can believe a considerable deal of
XML Standards Architect | rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a
Web Tech. and Standards | rational and cheerful manner.--Norman Douglas
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
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Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 16:31:00 UTC