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Re: XPointer crisis

• To: xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: XPointer crisis
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 12:48:17 -0500
• References: <p05100303b8807575e600@[192.168.155.106]>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120

David G. Durand wrote:

> Xpointer seems to be under imminent threat of being gutted. There 
> appears to be a significant chance that there will be no XPointer at 
> all, or only a drastically cut down one. Particularly endangered are the 
> ability to have ranges of any kind, or any forms of addressing other 
> than "bare names" or maybe child sequence locations.


This is overdramatized.  The question at hand is whether a more minimal
form of conformance should be permitted, so that people who want to
implement streaming XPointers don't have to handle full XPath syntax.
I know we have a lot of "streamers" around: the question is, do we
need to do XPath in XML fragment identifiers and XLinks in order
to declare victory?

I think the minimal set for victory is: bare names, child sequences
(like /1/2/3 or tag/4/5/6, walking the element tree), the latter
two with character-data counts, and ranges consisting of two of
any of these.  This allows you to do practical
pointing and transclusion (nobody points to an attribute, or a
namespace node, or a comment).  Check out the following:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2001AprJun/att-0074/02-NOTE-FIXptr-20010410.htm


> I would urge anyone in the XML community who is interested in Xpointer's 
> final approval with its current feature set to write immediately to the 
> W3C comment list for Xpointer and Xlink:
>  www-xml-linking-comments@w...


Yes, please do.

 
> Because this is a low-profile list, you may also want to comment to 
> individuals within the W3C as well. I refer you to the web site for any 
> addresses you may need.


Be advised that the W3C Linking WG page is seriously out of date.

 
> If you read the archives, you may also be puzzled that the word within 
> the W3c seems to be that XPointer is dead, given the very small number 
> of negative comments submitted. [There's no denying that the one I found 
> in quick scan of the archives for the last 4 months was very negative]. 
> However, such issues are irrelevant at this point.


XPointer is in CR state, meaning that feedback from implementers is
desired.  This has been lacking.

 

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@r...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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