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RE: Who Is Teaching XML To Technical Writers?

• From: "Len Bullard" <Len.Bullard@ses-i.com>
• To: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:42:28 -0500

Failure to obey the politeness/conformance/ContractBitesYouInTheAss of
the DTD, Mike.   We still have those.  Really big ones.

Mild or not, it is still a fail.  Remember, if the person on the other
end DOES turn on ID/IDREF checking, the DUPLICATEs are noted as
non-compliant and the documents come back for another round of possibly
"free" work.

Much depends on the post-process requirements.  If the ID/IDREFS are
used to generate link relationships (say xrefs in this DTD), then the
ambiguities are causing user errors later.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@saxonica.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 2:34 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re:  Who Is Teaching XML To Technical Writers?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using the name "id" for an 
attribute that isn't an ID with document-wide uniqueness. (One might 
expect it to be an id with some kind of uniqueness scope, but it 
wouldn't be surprising to see the attribute name "id" used for an 
"IDREF".) Semantics in XML are defined by the document vocabulary, not 
by XML itself. What exactly is wrong here? - simply a failure to observe

the conventions of polite society?

Compared with some of the XML abuses we see, this seems pretty mild. And

why do you blame the technical writers? If it's wrong, the failure is 
surely on the part of whoever designed the tools they are using.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 10/08/2012 16:48, Len Bullard wrote:
> <step1 id="F19T5BP12"><para id="F19T5BP12">...
>
> Fail.
>
> len
>
>
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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Who Is Teaching XML To Technical Writers?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
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  • OT: When Spell Checkers Strike
    • From: "Len Bullard" <Len.Bullard@ses-i.com>
  • Who Is Teaching XML To Technical Writers?
    • From: "Len Bullard" <Len.Bullard@ses-i.com>
  • Re: Who Is Teaching XML To Technical Writers?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>