- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:27:32 -0400
- To: Glenn Marcy <gmarcy@us.ibm.com>
- Cc: www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org
At 9:52 AM -0400 7/7/04, Glenn Marcy wrote: Elliotte, This situation doesn't seem at all unique to xml:lang. There could be other situations where an attribute of an ancestor of the embedded elements is considered "in-scope" and such attributes would need to be added to those elements during inclusion to preserve the semantics those attributes represent. This is a shocking statement. It looks completely unique to me. I see nothing in the XInclude specification that suggests this could be done for any attribute except xml:lang. The XInclude specification does specify how attributes are handled, and no attributes other than xml:lang get this treatment. An implementation that inherited the value of any attribute other than xml:lang would be nonconformant to the specification. While the XInclude specification describes behavior related to the attributes with such properties in the XML specification that appear in the base Infoset, these are not exhaustive. It is certainly possible that other specifications could build upon the base XInclude and specify additional attributes that would require such special handling. Again I see nothing in the XInclude specification or, for that matter, the Infoset specification, that in any way suggests this is acceptable. If your intent is to allow implementers to add attribute inheritance for attributes of their choice, then that's certainly not indicated in the spec. It might make sense to do that, though it's a radical change. However, it's not what the current public draft actually says. Removing the requirements for xml:lang processing in XInclude would appear to send a signal that we are precluding such usage, something that one tries to avoid in producing a core specification that is intended for use in as wide a range of XML processing scenarios as possible. The intent to use this in as wide a range of scenarios as you suggest here is by no means obvious. Perhaps it's what the working group meant all along. I don't know. But it is certainly not what they have written. The specification as written offers no grounds for inheriting the value of any attribute except xml:lang. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Thursday, 8 July 2004 14:46:59 UTC