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Re: XLink and XForms

• To: Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer <schnitz@m...>
• Subject: Re: XLink and XForms
• From: "J.Pietschmann" <j3322ptm@y...>
• Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 21:08:53 +0200
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <D0F1529EE943B3449F755CA1A40887465B40D5@w...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020721

Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer wrote:
> Well, how would you have done it?
What do you mean?
Ah, probably:
 > 		...XPath for references within XForm
(In ancient times, people quoted the statements they
answered to immediately above the answer.)

Well, there are still IDs which can be used for
references within the same document, or, slightly more
general, names. An XPath can be seen as a "natural implied
name", nevertheless, the problems I have with this
choice:
- It increases the pressure on XSLT processor implementations
   to provide functionality to dynamically evaluate XPaths
   coming from the input XML. Having such a function enabled
   is a potential security risk, and does not fit all that
   well with XSLT compilers (and renders all the work of the
   WG to keep XSLT easily compilable moot).
- It is more of a burden for XForm writers than it may look
   at a first glance. If there are inserts or rearrangements
   of the data elements, every reference has to be checked and
   perhaps changed. This pretty much requires tool support
   for editing of not-quite-trivial forms. If they used IDs
   or names, this is not a problem.

> BTW I too wish there was a general
> syntax for addressing what is inside a 
> document tree and outside of it. XForms 
> needs both links to external resources as 
> well as to nodes within documents.

XPath does only adress the problem of selecting nodes within
a document. It does not help adressing other documents.

> How those links are expressed in terms of 
> syntax to provide the binding between ui 
> markup and data is not addressed by 
> XLink, so XPath became the obvious choice.

IDs have a longer history than XPath, and should be as obvious.
I wonder every time whether the SGML fundamentalists on this list
can read the XForm spec without running amok <evil grin>.

J.Pietschmann

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XLink and XForms
    • From: Jeni Tennison <jeni@j...>
  • Re: XLink and XForms
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>

• References:
  • Re: XLink and XForms
    • From: "Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer" <schnitz@m...>

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