RE: Removal (Time for XMail?)

Most definitely... one possible solution that I've starting thinking about
was some kind of scoped-id mechanism.  I'm not sure how this would work
exactly so it is more of just a random thought, but it would be nice to be
able to declare ID's within a particular scope in the document itself.  In
others words:

  <doc>
    <some_data id='a1'/>
    <some_data id='a2'/>
    <some_data id='a3' local_scoped_id='1'>
       <item id='a1'/>
       <item id='a2'/>
       <item id='a3'/>
    </some_data>
  </doc>

The three <some_data/> elements exist in the global document scope, while
the three <item/> elements exist within their own local scope.  Validation
of ID's would occur on the scope level.  Obviously, there would be a lot of
issues to work out. ;-)

Anway, just a thought.

- James

-----Original Message-----
From: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org [mailto:xml-dist-app-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Noah_Mendelsohn@lotus.com
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 7:11 AM
To: Ed Mooney
Cc: bigor@infolio.com; cagle@olywa.net; xml-dist-app@w3.org
Subject: Re: Removal (Time for XMail?)


I have a suspicion, not carefully considered, that ID= attributes can 
cause problems when XML is used as a generalized container for other XML. 
For example, let's consider the case where your e-mail has several 
attachments, each of them XML, and they make conflicting use of the same 
ID names.  As best I can tell, you can work around this as long as you're 
careful about what you validate and how, but as I say, I suspect there are 
some messy edge conditions here.  Certainly there are likely to be 
problems with any tools that take the container document as a whole and 
try to blindly interpret ID attributes. 

I have had this same concern for SOAP, for example, insofar as it serves 
as a generalized packaging framework for assembling XML messages.  Not a 
fatal problem, I think, but probably something that deserves a bit of 
thought.

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Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Friday, 29 September 2000 11:50:06 UTC