Re: [xml-dev] Re: determining ID-ness in XML

[Tom Bradford <bradford@dbxmlgroup.com>]

On Monday, October 29, 2001, at 11:53 AM, Tim Bray wrote:
> [Trying to keep this one on both xml-dev & ietf-xml-mime]
>
> At 08:40 AM 29/10/01 -0600, Paul Grosso wrote:
>> Here are some options (all discussed before):
>> 1.  use the internal subset to declare IDs
>
> #1 is minimal-impact.  Can it be sold?  I.e., if you
> want the "name" attr to be an ID, then you need the following
> at the top of the file with a line for each element type
> that "name" can appear on:
>
> <!DOCTYPE rootType [
>  <!ATTLIST element1 name ID #IMPLIED>
>  <!ATTLIST element2 name ID #IMPLIED>
>  ... etc...
> ]>
>
> I'm not sure it's going to be easy to get the community to
> buy into this.

Wouldn't this have even deeper implications?  By this I mean that a 
validating parser won't validate a document that has no DOCTYPE 
references (treats it simply as well-formed), but *will* try to validate 
a document in an all-or-nothing fashion if there is.  Simply identifying 
an ATTLIST won't be enough because the 'rootType' element won't be 
defined.

Just seems really kludgey to me.

--Tom