Re: comment on XML 1.0 5th edition

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David Carlisle writes:

> Could you answer a simple yes/no question, as to whether on the day the
> 5th edition is published  whether an xpath statement that uses xpath
> with a "new" Name is conformant to the W3C specifications or not?
>
> XPath2 references
>
> World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0. (Third
> Edition) W3C Recommendation. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml 

Well, that's a problem, isn't it :-) ?  It _names_ a specific version,
but _points to_ the undated version.  If you take the name as
definitive, then it remains conformant.  If you take the pointer as
definitive, it could be seen as becoming non-conformant.

I say 'could be', because (and my colleague Michael Sperberg-McQueen
is the expert on this, I'll try to channel him on this), specs which
(name and) refer to undated versions should do so in a way which
allows implementations to track the resulting changes in an
implementation-defined way, that is, all they have to do to be
conformant is to identify which version they are (currently)
supporting.  That makes sense to me.

ht
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Friday, 3 October 2008 11:06:33 UTC