Feedback on XInclude CR Version 1.0 21 February 2002

  First I would like to report that libxml2 implementation is
mostly complete and I got feedback it was used for documentation
maintainance (DocBook based). The main interest was that contrary
to entities it was possible to keep the included parts valid
document instances.
  I think I got only one feedback from users reporting the use
of XPointer expressions, they were actually xpath expression
using the xpointer() scheme to select subset of the included document.
I personally would prefer to keep the dependancy on the full XPointer
spec but I can hardly justify it with existing use. It is clear that
it makes the implementation more complex, I don't believe that the
XInclude spec should itself define a subset, if such a need exist it
is likely to be defined directly at the fragment identifier definition
level for XML resources. There is a clear distinction too between the
complexity of just implementing bare name identifier (pointing to the
ID) which is an expected feature of such a fragment identifier and
the full XPointer selection capabilities, I tend to think that if a 
level can be drawn in XInclude XPointer support it's the most natural
place to make the cut.

  Libxml2 recent versions implement ID/IDREF fixups, this was actually
asked by one user of the XInclude support.
  Concerning Namespace Fixup, it seems more reasonable to do that
fixup when the resulting document is to be serialized back (if needed)
after XInclude processing, this follows the guidelines of XSLT processing
and allow implementors to keep the specificities of their namespace node
implementation (libxml2 does not represent them in the document tree).

  Basically I think XInclude should proceed to Proposed Recommendation
status with minimal changes,

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
veillard@redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2002 08:49:16 UTC