- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:48:41 -0400
- To: www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org
Section 3.1 states: Since the xpointer attribute is not a URI reference, %-escaping must not appear in the XPointer, nor is there any need for a processor to apply or reverse such escaping. I would normally interpret "must not" as a fatal error. However, 1. This is not linked to http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-xinclude-20040930/#dt-must like "must not" and "must" in the previous paragraph. 2. Later, the spec says, "An error in the XPointer is a resource error." I would ask that this sentence be clarified one way or the other. Either write, "Since the xpointer attribute is not a URI reference, there is no need for a processor to apply or reverse %-escaping in the XPointer; and such escaping is a fatal error", or simply write "Since the xpointer attribute is not a URI reference, there is no need for a processor to apply or reverse %-escaping in the XPointer; and processors must not do so." The latter approach would allow XPointers to contain percent signs that were not used for escaping if some as-yet-undefined XPointer scheme allowed that. Then the XInclude processor could simply pass the xpointer to the XPointer processor and allow the processor to detect any errors in the XPointer, all of which could be treated the same (as resource errors). Now that I think about it, this isn't even theoretical. XPointers using the xpointer scheme can contain unescaped percent signs, when they're not used as parts of IRIs or URIs, which is the case here, For instance xpointer(//p[@symbol="%"]) In fact, they can even contain things that look like percent escapes, and might be in a different context: xpointer(//a[@href="http://www.example.com/%CE.html"]) Therefore this really needs to be treated the same as all other XPointer error conditions, and made a resource error rather than a fatal error. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
Received on Monday, 25 October 2004 09:10:21 UTC