Re: Re Deprecate/Undefined (was Request for status dump and issues check)

At 13:45 2000 06 23 -0400, David G. Durand wrote:
>At 11:32 PM -0500 6/22/00, Dan Connolly wrote:
>>(as Paul G put it:
>>2.  say that a document containing an nsattrib whose value is a
>>     relative URI has no defined infoset.)
>
>I'm not 100% sure that this is a good idea. My objection is based on 
>a separate set of issues:
>
>  1. Xlink should work for any well-formed XML document.

XLink doesn't work on XML documents at all.  XLink allows
you to link between all kind of resources.  XLink uses
XPointer to address into XML documents (and allows the
use of other things to address into other resources).
I suspect you meant to say "XPointer" here.

>  2. XLink is defined on the information set of an XML document.

I'm not sure this is really related to the primary topic of
discussion on this list, but (1) XLink isn't defined on the
information set of an XML document.  You are probably thinking
of XPointer, not XLink.  (2) XPointer probably should be defined
on an infoset, and maybe it is, but I'm not sure because XPointer
is defined on top of XPath and (3) XPath is not defined on top
of infoset, rather it defines its own data/object model.

>  3. Therefore, every well-formed XML document should have an information
set.

This is already not the case.  The infoset only covers well-formed
XML documents that are namespace-valid.  Long ago, we made the
decision that the Infoset spec would not cover well-formed documents
that are not namespace-valid.

>I'd like to see a scenario where the information set of a document 
>that has defective namespace declarations, or relative URIs in them, 
>would instead have an information set _minus_ all namespace 
>properties, just as it would have had if there were no namespace 
>declarations.
>
>Otherwise there would be no way for an Xpointer to select an XML 
>element in a "namespace-defective document" because that document 
>would not have an infoset.

Yes, this is an open issue for XPointer already.  For example,
it is not clear if XPointer can address into an external parsed
entity because it's not clear that such has an infoset.  This
isn't just a namespace problem.

>Alternatively, if it's allowed to ask for the infoset of an XML 
>document "explicitly ignoring" any apparent namespace declarations, 
>then a fallback policy would be possible.
>
>This is really an information set issue, that touches on the 
>namespace issues, but it does seem closely enough related that it's 
>worth thinking about.

Yes and no.  It has long ago been decided that the Infoset spec
would only define infosets for well-formed XML documents that
are namespace-valid.  Therefore, all we need to decide now is
what documents are namespace-valid (and what the actual
namespaces names are in all cases); that is all that is in scope 
for this discussion.

After this in-scope issue is addressed, then the XML Core WG can
decide what will be the infoset of those namespace-valid documents. 
And then perhaps the XLink WG needs to figure out how XPointer is
involved, and maybe even XPath needs to be rewritten to take the
Infoset into account (though I'm not really suggesting that just
now), but the point is that all this is out of scope of the current
discussion.

paul

Received on Friday, 23 June 2000 15:00:11 UTC