just what is IDness? [was: Draft TAG finding available: xmlIDSemantics-32]

At 20:12 2003 05 12 +0200, Chris Lilley wrote:

>[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/xmlIDSemantics-32-20030512.html

With respect to:

>The concept of IDness, which exists in well formed documents, should be distinguished from the three validation constraints that XML places on IDs:
>
>Validity constraint: ID
>Values of type ID must match the Name production. A name must not appear more than once in an XML document as a value of this type; i.e., ID values must uniquely identify the elements which bear them.

in [1], I'm not sure how to read this.

I understand separating the determination that something
*has* IDness from validation.

My question is what you want "having IDness" to mean.

I don't think this document makes that clear.

In particular, the above quote is apparently trying to
say some things that IDness *isn't*.  It seems to be
saying that IDness doesn't mean uniqueness of this
name in the document--which might or might not make 
sense--but it also seems to be saying that IDness doesn't 
mean the value has to match the Name production.  Do you 
really mean this?  I would imagine that calling something 
with a space in it, for example, an ID would break lots of 
things, and I wouldn't think you'd want to allow that.

You can't appeal just to XML 1.0 for the answer, since
XML 1.0 doesn't define IDness separate from attribute
declaration processing (which you don't want to require).

I would assume the best answer appeals to the Infoset.
Something like:  IDness of an attribute means that
that attribute's Attribute Information Item in the 
document's infoset has an [attribute type] property
that has the value "ID".

If that isn't your definition of IDness (and even if
it is), I think this document needs to expand on the
meaning of IDness.

paul

Received on Monday, 16 June 2003 18:02:26 UTC