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Re: XPointer crisis

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: XPointer crisis
• From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 13:36:35 -0800
• Cc: www-xml-linking-comments@w..., Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
• In-reply-to: <20020201144101.E29819@r...>
• References: <20020201144101.E29819@r...> <1012587257.27106.38.camel@l...> <p05100303b8807575e600@[192.168.155.106]> <1012587257.27106.38.camel@l...> <20020201123611.D29819@r...> <5.1.0.14.0.20020201134448.029015c8@157.189.161.214>

On xml-dev, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 02:08:50PM -0500, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> > In HTML, most pointers are done with very simple pointers like this:
> >
> > http://somesite.com/html/top.html#section_2
>
>   Whose semantic is hardcoded in a DTD that nearly no application
> ever respected or used. Let's have a look of the alternatives in XML:
>
>   #foo
>
>   Hard to rely on it with XML, well last time I suggested on this forum xml:i
> I got a lot of flack back, I won't try again.
>   So either you accept to force validation of document (and hence
> possibly have to fetch and trust remote DTD in your framework) or you
> need other pointing schemes.
>
> [... other pointing schemes ...]
>
>   If you think that
>      #foo
> is simple and fast, yes in a very well defined context, in general it's
> an horrible solution, you have to rely on something outside the document
> itself to simply make that request. //*[@id=foo] at least can work directly
> on the document.


I *strongly* agree with this conclusion.

Something like 'nameloc' is necessary for stable references,
but it doesn't have to be expressed as a barename.

'//*[@id=foo]' (or some other syntax with equivalent semantics)
can accomplish everything that 'id(foo)' can.  More, actually:
it also works with documents that don't have (or have but don't
reference) a DTD, W3C XML Schema, or other infoset-augmenting
resource.  As an added bonus, the recipient doesn't have to 
retrieve (and process!) the DTD/XSD/what-have-you.

On the originating end, if you know that the document has an element 
with an ID-bearing attribute with value 'foo' that you want to reference,
then you almost certainly know the name of that attribute,
so requiring '#@attname=value' instead of just '#value' doesn't
lose anything.

Re: the 'xml:id' and 'xml:idattr' proposals: these sound reasonable,
but it seems to me like an awful lot of work to specify, implement,
and deploy just for the sake of barename fragment identifiers.



--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Christian Nentwich <c.nentwich@c...>
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>

• References:
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • XPointer crisis
    • From: "David G. Durand" <david@d...>
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: XPointer crisis
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...>

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