RE: Incorrect use of the word "valid' in the XSLT 2.0 WD

Thanks for these comments. I'll record it as an editorial issue and try to
get the corrections into the next published draft.

Michael Kay 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent: 03 March 2002 20:45
> To: xsl-editors@w3.org
> Subject: Incorrect use of the word "valid' in the XSLT 2.0 WD
> 
> 
> Section 12.1 states:
> 
> The lang attribute indicates that a collation suitable for a 
> particular natural language is required. The effective value of the 
> attribute must be a value that would be valid for the xml:lang 
> attribute (see [XML])
> 
> In fact, the 2nd edition of the XML spec is quite clear that no 
> particular value for xml:lang is either malformed or invalid, in and 
> of itself. And of course in general, validity depends on what the DTD 
> says.
> 
> I suggest that this section be reworded to state something like "The 
> effective value of the attribute must be a language code as defined 
> by he values of the attribute are language identifiers as defined by 
> [IETF RFC 3066], Tags for the Identification of Languages, or its 
> successor on the IETF Standards Track
> 
> 
> Similarly
> 
> ERR77 states:
> 
> [ERR077] It is a dynamic error if a resource contains characters that 
> are not valid XML characters. The processor must either signal the 
> error, or must recover in an implementation-defined way; one possible 
> outcome is that the processor will produce an output file that is not 
> well-formed XML.
> 
> I think this should be "characters that are not valid XML 
> characters". Otherwise it implies that validity is a prerequisite for 
> XSLT.  The same problem reoccurrs in ERR078.
> 
> Section 14.3.2 states "if the value is not a valid QName" which 
> should really be "if the value is not a well-formed QName" 14.6.4, 
> ERR093, ERR098, ERR099, ERR101, and ERR106 have the identical problem.
> 
> ERR086 also overloads the definition of valid in the description of 
> picture strings.
> 
> 16.1.2 uses the word "validation" when what it probably means is some 
> for of well-formedness checking.
> 
> Section 18 uses the word valid in the context of checking URI syntax.
> 
> In general I'd try to be very careful about using the word "valid" 
> when it does not specifically reference the concept of DTD or schema 
> validity. Several places in the spec use it to refer to things like 
> "expressions that would have been valid under XPath 1.0". I would 
> prefer "expressions that would have been syntactically correct under 
> XPath" or "expressions that would have been legal under XPath 1.0" 
> This definition of the word valid doesn't appear to actually be 
> defined until very late in the spec J1.
> -- 
> 
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> |          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
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> |   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
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Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 04:13:58 UTC