Re: Validating Link/XPointer local 'bare names'.

At 07:46 PM 9/1/00 +0200, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am trying to use XLink/XPointer local 'bare names' to specify links
>for nodes within the same document.
>...
>And I wonder how I can validate (to check the existence of the
>references) this kind of document.

In general, we have stayed away from solutions for checking link 
validity/robustness in the XLink and XPointer specs.  There is even a 
section on the difficulty of the problem at the following location from 
early 1999:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xptr-req#Robustness

However, the "pseudo-IDREF" case is very nearly a syntactic validity issue, 
rather than a robustness-over-time issue.  Even so (personal opinion here), 
I don't think it would be practical in the general case for XLink or 
XPointer to mandate checking of the sort that an XML processor does, 
because the ID might be in a totally separate document ("doc.xml#id"); the 
availability of resources isn't stable enough to give a 100% answer as to 
whether the ID'd thing is there, even if the document hasn't changed over time.

You wouldn't be able to use regular DTD validation to check the "#" 
reference, obviously, because it's not an XML IDREF.  But you could use 
something like XSLT (Schematron?) to do this level of checking.

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com

Received on Friday, 1 September 2000 15:40:41 UTC