Re: Why Use anyURI

From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:04:40 +0100

Play the video

On 15/09/2010 1:35 AM, Heitke.Chris wrote:

360A1674FFC73B42BFD657060941DBF3146115E2@FG200201EVS.ftb.ca.gov" type="cite">

I have been asked what data type should be used for a website address element in a schema?

At first I thought the anyURI type would be appropriate. Maybe would insure the data is valid address. Whereas the string type might not… problem is, validation tests show that the anyURI type allows virtually anything, just like the string type… So why use anyURI as a base data type? It does not appear to provide any greater assurance that the data will be better qualified than what would be gotten from a string?

Christopher A. Heitke

State of California, FTB

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The road to xs:anyURI was paved with good intentions. The XSD 1.0 spec is notoriously vague about what validation rules should be applied to it (it contains the notorious phrase "This definition imposes only very modest obligations on ·minimally conforming· processors", while failing to say clearly what those obligations are) and in consequence many implementations allow anything (or almost anything). In XSD 1.1 the WG admitted defeat and changed the spec so the lexical space is exactly the same as xs:string. The XQuery and XSLT specifications also treat xs:anyURI more-or-less as equivalent to xs:string.

So should you use xs:anyURI? Well, it provides a bit of documentation of your intent, and it might give you better bindings to data types in other languages. It has a bit more semantics than xs:string, though it's all very implicit. But the fact that something is present in a spec doesn't mean you have to use it.

Michael Kay

Follow-Ups:
- Re: Why Use anyURI
  - From: "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp>
- Re: Why Use anyURI
  - From: Michael Glavassevich <mrglavas@ca.ibm.com>
- Re: Why Use anyURI
  - From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>

References:
- Why Use anyURI
  - From: "Heitke.Chris" <Chris.Heitke@ftb.ca.gov>

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