Re: [xml-dev] IDs without DTD/Schema , Is there a way ?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 09:00:33AM -0400, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 11:16 AM -0700 10/25/01, Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> 
> >Yes, and this is one of our really big outstanding serious
> >architectural problems.  It's really important for the 
> >workings of the web that an address such as 
> >
> >http://example.com/foo#Chapter12
> >
> >have well-defined semantics.  If foo turns out to be XML, 
> >this is hopelessly underdefined.  At various times James Clark
> >and I have both suggested that we just brutally hijack the 
> >attribute name "id" and assert that it is of DTD type ID.
> >
> >Other ideas have included using xml:id or having a reserved
> >namespace http://w3.org/xmlid or some such; any attribute 
> >associated with it is of type ID.
> >
> >This one isn't going to go away.  -Tim
> 
> 
> Is there any chance we could push XPointer back to working draft one more time to fix this there? It seems to me this doesn't require a change to XML 1.0, but does require one to XPointer. 

  Well if foo have an ID attribute on an element of value "Chapter12"
then of course foo#Chapter12 will have the expected semandtic with the existing
version of XPointer (and I think all the previous ones too !).
  The problem at stake if I understand correctly is to actually 
always be able to find the fact that this attribute is an ID, even
if case of:
    - absence of DTD
    - the parser is not validating
    - you don't want to trust a remote DTD but just the XML instance
 for example.

 I have myself advocated getting xml:id been integrated in the XML spec
because that's the only clean way to get reliable linking even in the absence
of Dtd or Schemas validation without trying to use structure/XPath based
naming schemes.

 Seems that having people submit this as a NOTE would be a good first
step to get this considered seriously, if someone wants to start the
effort, I would be happy to help !

Daniel

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