XML Protocols Last Call Issue 362

In your email [1] you raised on behalf of the XML Forms WG a number of
issues, one set of which the Protocols Workgroup has classified as their
last call issue #362 [2].  This note represents the official response of
the Protocols WG to these requests.

We divided the issue into two related parts:

Part I:

"l) [Part2 3.1.5.2 ref Attribute Information Item]
Please change the name of this to "idref". This not only more closely
represents the type of the attribute (xs:IDREF), but also avoids cognitive
dissonance with the XForms attribute 'ref' (which bears an XPath
expression)."

The Protocols Workgroup has recently decided to add namespace qualification
to all of our attributes, and in particular to the attribute formerly known
as "ref".  We believe that the resulting qualified attribute is
sufficiently distinct as to not cause confusion with XForms.  In general,
we name our attributes by their purpose, not their type, and so
respectfully decline to use IDREF as the localname of the attribute.

Part II:

"[Part2 3.2 Decoding Faults]
id->idref constraint violations are serious problems. Please change
'SHOULD'
to 'MUST' on the requirement to signal a fault under these conditions."

We note that SOAP processing never depends on validation [3]:

"SOAP does not require that XML Schema processing (assessment or
validation) be performed to establish the correctness or 'schema implied'
values of element and attribute information items defined by this
specification."

Indeed, the soapenc:ref and soapenc:id attributes (the new names) are
provided for SOAP's own purposes.  We note further that there are many
reasonable situations in which checking for a match of id and idref might
be inappropriate.  For example, the application might determine, perhaps by
processing a header, that it has no need to inspect the encoded data at
all.  Making the check a MUST would require the node to check the ID/IDREF
pairs, regardless of whether the data is needed by the application.  We
therefore believe that SHOULD is the best description of our intent, which
is that in most cases the correctness of the reference should be checked.
In any case, we specifically decline to associate such checking with a need
to do XML Schema or DTD validation:  such validation is allowed as if the
application so desires, but is never required and is considered
non-normative.  [4]

We hope you find these explanations and our resolution to be satisfactory.
If not, please contact us as soon as possible.  Thank you very much.

Noah

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xmlp-comments/2002Jul/0090.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xmlp-lc-issues.html#x362
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-soap12-part1-20020626/#reltoxml
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-soap12-part2-20020626/#encschema

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Thursday, 10 October 2002 16:38:00 UTC