Re: XLink 1.1: Error handling

/ Anne van Kesteren <fora@annevankesteren.nl> was heard to say:
| Quoting Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>:
|> This link does not conform to XLink:
|>
|>  <someElement xlink:type="foobar">foo</someElement>
|
| Your proposed text seems reanonable, but does it cover the slightly more
| complicated case of:
|
| <someElement xlink:href="test" xlink:type="bogus">foo</someElement>
|
| ...? Especially now xlink:type is more or less optional. And what

xlink:type is optional only in the sense that it has the
application-implied value "simple" on elements with xlink:href. The
value "bogus" is not conformant.

| should happen
| with:
|
| <someElement xlink:href="test" xlink:bogus="foo">foo</someElement>

We've added a conformance point to indicate that xlink:bogus is not
conformant.

The XLink 1.0 specification is woefully inadequate in what it says
about errors. I think several changes that we've made in response to
comments on this and other threads have actually gone quite a ways
towards clarifying the situation.

The spec now:

1. Identifies conformant markup.
2. Specifies that non-conformant markup has no XLink semantics

That means that neither of the elements above have XLink semantics,
they don't function as links. We haven't said anything about what a
processor must do with these errors, but I think that's ok.
Applications are free to report them (applications, as I'm fond of
pointing out, are free to warn about the phase of the moon if they
wish) but they are not required to take any particular action (which
might not be appropriate in simple link-harvesting applications
anyway).

I hope that you are satisfied that the XLink specification is now
clear about what constitutes an error and what meaning erroneous
markup has (none at all).

Does this help satisfy your concerns in any way?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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