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Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than ID

• To: "John Cowan" <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
• From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>
• Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 18:30:16 -0500
• Cc: "Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@d...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• References: <3BEF9991.9080102@d...> <008f01c16b79$0bf75d20$0a2e249b@n...> <3BEFCC10.4010600@d...> <00cc01c16bb6$2016f580$0a2e249b@n...> <3BF05116.3020208@r...>

John Cowan wrote:


> Jonathan Borden wrote:
>
>
> > The only reason that I see the need for something really lightweight
like
> > "xml:id" is that internal subsets are not well handled by common
software
> > (e.g. SAX),
>
>
> Actually, SAX is able to report the types of attributes.  There is
> nothing in XML 1.0 requiring XML processors to make this information
> available, however.

By "not well handled" I mean statements like this from the javadoc for
DeclHandler:

"This is an optional extension handler for SAX2 to provide information about
DTD declarations in an XML document. XML readers are not required to support
this handler, and this handler is not included in the core SAX2
distribution."

Again, there does _exist_ a current mechanism to solve the "ID" problem, its
just that it isn't always used. Perhaps the solution would be to make this
interface mandatory for future SAX processors.

Of course another solution to the ID problem would be to simply replace the
non-XML DTD syntax with an XML syntax ... yeah ... that would really help to
simplify XML because then we could do everything in the same syntax ... has
anyone thought of that yet?

Jonathan

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better thanIDs...
    • From: David Brownell <david-b@p...>

• References:
  • IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>
  • Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>
  • Re: IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better than IDs...
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

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