Re: id() doesn't work!?

On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 12:16:56PM -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
> However, in my XPointer implementation, I cannot provide that natural
> fallback behavior. That means that lots of authors will have to rewrite
> their pointers from bare names to "//*[@id='name']" in order to make
> their documents work--that seems wrong and avoidable to me.
> 
> But at the same time, the XPointer spec had little choice: it would be
> wrong for that spec to impose the name "id" on users (XML could do it
> because it's defining the markup language and individual document types
> can do it, but an after-the-fact support mechanism like XPointer cannot)
> and codifying even a standard fallback behavior would potentially lead
> to subtle, non-intuitive failures (or lack of failure when failure is
> expected) when 'id' was not in fact an ID attribute in a particular
> document.

  yes, I think Eve Maler raised the case of existing DTDs where "id"
attributes were not of type ID <grin/> .

> I think that the only answer to this problem is for the community of XML
> users to agree on a convention for IDs and pointers and for it to be
> codified in XML 2.0 or some such. I would be perfectly happy if "id"
> always meant "ID" and "href" always meant "URI-based pointer". I think

  Last time I suggested xml:id on xml-dev I got "roasted", I'm not
gonna try again :-( . 

Daniel

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