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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Re: determining ID-ness in XML
 That is what I find weird about the positions advocated so far. In both cases, beyond well-formedness process information is being added into the document with "magic strings", a solution that was not liked in the XML WG work originally, and because existing architectural solutions do exist to the problem. PIs are magic strings of a sort and usually considered to be system strings. xml:id is yet another system string. Again, why would xml:id be architecturally superior? Without answers to that question, there is no reason to continue this thread because the requirement has not been clearly articulated. Yes, I've seen problems with not knowing something is an ID but the answer has been, find the Schema or DTD? What, no schema or DTD? Then why do you care? Well I need to know if these are unique? Isn't that a processor issue of local scope? Yes. So find a DTD or schema to define that. No. Why? I don't want to open a file or I may not have the file or I don't like the file. To any of these one can say, but the XML spec gave you a way. And so it will go. Articulate the requirements so we have a definition of why we need to take a working solution and provide an alternative. Really, we have to do this every time someone wants to add a magic string or change the core XML definitions. Otherwise, next year, it is yet another thread on how "hard XML is to implement". And, magic strings turn it into RTF. len -----Original Message----- From: Marcus Carr [mailto:mrc@a...] Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 4:29 PM To: Tim Bray Cc: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: Re: determining ID-ness in XML Tim Bray wrote: > >2. use a PI to declare IDs > > Yecch. Barf. Blecch. Feh. Oh, this is supposed to > be a technical discussion. I know that Tim's not a fan of PIs, but in this situation it seems like the lowest impact solution. What more perfect use for a processing instruction than to tell an application "when you process, regard these attributes as IDs"? Considering the attributes to be IDs is document or processor-level information anyway, not a quality inherent to the attribute or the element that contains it. If the document or any part of it is used in a different context, it may be necessary to treat the attributes as something other than IDs. It may also be desirable to periodically check that attribute values are unique as a part of data analysis - it would be a lot easier to add a PI and give the instance to a processer than to remap the current attributes into the xml:id namespace. -- Regards, Marcus Carr email: mrc@a... ___________________________________________________________________ Allette Systems (Australia) www: http://www.allette.com.au ___________________________________________________________________ "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Einstein ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl> 
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