Re: Best Practice: id-idref or external entities?

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From: Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@g...>
To: David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle@g...>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2015 09:50:30 -0500

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 7:14 AM, David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle@g...> wrote:

On 8 October 2015 at 13:06, Costello, Roger L. <costello@m...> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> What is your experience with using id-idref? Good experience? Bad experience? It seems to me that the id-idref pair has a lot of resemblances to GOTOs, which implies that it might be wise to avoid id-idref.

This seems a somewhat bizarre analogy?

with id you are preserving the notion of a _reference_ and can for
example see if multiple
places reference the same thing.

With entities (including files of some format you did not show) then
the data is essentially copied and (in most API) there is no record of
the reference.

Seems Roger has maybe turned the corner from being data oriented to being purely document oriented. If you're reading XML as a human and want to follow the id to idref then yeah, you may end up jumping around. That aside, I think id / idref is probably one of the main features of XML that distinguishes it from things like JSON. The fact that one can normalize out common references with some degree of integrity and error checking is a very good thing for data management and possibly for compact transmission sizes. If I'm interviewing supposed XML experts and they can't explain what id / idref do and why you might want them I'm instantly going to class them as non-experts...

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References:
- Best Practice: id-idref or external entities?
  - From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>
- Re: Best Practice: id-idref or external entities?
  - From: David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle@g...>

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