Re: Last Call review of XML Pointer WD Version 1.0

"Martin J. Duerst" wrote:
> 
> At 11:32 1999/12/13 -0600, Paul Grosso wrote:
> > At 16:09 1999 12 05 -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > >"XML Pointer Language 1.0" Last Call Working Draft.
> > >The document address is:
> > >
> > >       http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xptr-19991206
> 
> > I am also concerned for similar reasons to 1 and 2 above that a single
> > XPointer appears to allow the addressing of multiple nodes.  In section 2.4,
> > the spec says that, since "XPointers are not a general query mechanism...an
> > empty result is a sub-resource error."  If XPointer is not a general query
> > mechanism but is rather a fragment identifier syntax, then it seems equally
> > erroneous for a result to return multiple nodes, especially disjoint ones.
> 
> Please note that for RTL scripts (Arabic, Hebrew), graphical user
> selection can lead to the selection of more than one logical parts
> (ranges) of a document.

And that logical selection, which is more likely to be useful (ie, give
you text you can paste somewhere else and have it still make sense) will
give a contiguous selection on the document (a single start point and a
single end point) although it may display as multiple discontiguous
portions on the screen.

This is the more common case, since selection is typically initiated by
some sort of pointer click and the other end is determined by tracking
the current pointer position (and finalised by a second click); this
produces a single start and a single end, and the selected portion is
all characters in between. This is exactly the same for LTR, RTL and
mixed scripts; only the visual result differs.

--
Chris

Received on Thursday, 16 December 1999 10:41:38 UTC