[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: So maybe ID isn't a problem after all.
On Sunday 11 November 2001 05:01 am, Daniel Veillard wrote: > On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 01:19:21AM -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote: > > People understood XML pretty well. > > Hum, coming from basically 2 years of work educating the Gnome project > developpers to use XML, they are making real use of it, but certainly > not specialist in markup languages. > > If you limit it to: > - well formedness > - just ascii > - strip "formatting blanks" > > then this is is true. OK. I probably overstated the ease-of-use thing, but I was pretty much just thinking of elements, attributes, and text. My experience is that users, *not* developers, can grok things at that level pretty easily. > I don't think xml:base is any more complex than understanding encoding > support, or xml:space. Well, I think xml:space is another misguided attempt, so cheerfully ignore it and recommend that other do the same. As for encoding support... only those who have a need have to learn about it. > On the other hand properly setting the DOCTYPE and having working > Catalogs (SGML or XML) is still black magic for a number of > users of XML (i.e. not designers). And this is the basic building > blocks needed to have a working framework in practice. I don't think you need these in order to use XML effectively. In some cases, yes, in most, no. > If you put xml:id="foo" on an element then blah.xml#foo will point to it > > is relatively clear and simple. On the other hand Why special case it though? The main thing ID's buy you is a guarantee that a validating parser is going to ensure the values are unique. How about ignoring all the DTD and XML special treatment and simply say that foo.xml?@id='bar' will point to all id attributes with the value 'bar', or something suchlike, *in the context of your application*? > I think the first case gives them 80% of their pointing needs. I won't > suggest they use anything like this for existing DTD like DocBook we use > for documentation where DTD processing is basically mandatory, but for > all the simple uses like small data storage (configuration files, > speadsheet format, etc...) it just fits the bill. Most of those simple > cases don't even have a DTD defined for them. Sure, so if they don't have a DTD, why are we pushing something that has meaning only in that context? The only reason I've seen foo.xml#bar proposed is for HTML compatability, and guess what, I've not seen much HTML using that construct. Why not put in place a more generic, and just as simple solution? AT least people wouldn't have to learn special rules, and remember when they apply and when they don't.
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