- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:31:53 -0800
- To: www-tag@w3.org, "w3. org" <www-tag@w3.org>
Wow, I take a week off in Hawai'i, what a welcome back. A few things seem obvious: - The C14n rule about propagating any and all xml:-namespace attributes down the element tree is awfully stupid and broken, and since the process gave us all lots of chances to review the C14n REC, we all share in the stupidity and broken-ness. - Interestingly, I suspect quite a few c14n implementations may have missed that one. I know that my genx implementation misses it, and furthermore, the application of Elliotte Rusty Harold's excellent test suite failed to detect the bug (or maybe I just missed it, but I don't think so). Anyhow, just maybe it's not too late to go back and fix XML C14n. - The assertions about the immutability of namespaces, and what they necessarily identify (container vs collection) are seriously inoperative, since there are real working deployed examples out there that fail to abide by any of these assertions, and the software seems to deal with it, so the theologians here should too. - The assertions about necessary linkage between namespaces and versioning policy are similarly inoperative. There is no general policy in place and no chance of getting one. - The "xmlid" solution would dodge the C14n broken-ness, but the pain of explaining this to successive generations of people down the road seems almost too great to bear. - Just charging ahead with "xml:id" is perhaps bearable too; note that in the actual instance, the behavior of a canonicalizer would result in the first appearance of xml:id in the instance being in the original location... so software can probably work around this. At the end of the day I'm basically not worried. Xml:id is demonstrably a solution to a non-problem anyhow. There is currently no basis in any normative specification for software receiving data served as */xml to expect ID attributes to be defined, and we've sailed along for five years or so now without this resulting in much breakage. So at least we should try, as physicians do, first to do no harm. -Tim
Received on Monday, 14 February 2005 08:31:45 UTC