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

[Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au>]

Tim Bray wrote:

> >2.  use a PI to declare IDs
>
> Yecch.  Barf.  Blecch.  Feh.  Oh, this is supposed to
> be a technical discussion.

I know that Tim's not a fan of PIs, but in this situation it seems like
the lowest impact solution. What more perfect use for a processing
instruction than to tell an application "when you process, regard these
attributes as IDs"?

Considering the attributes to be IDs is document or processor-level
information anyway, not a quality inherent to the attribute or the
element that contains it. If the document or any part of it is used in a
different context, it may be necessary to treat the attributes as
something other than IDs.

It may also be desirable to periodically check that attribute values are
unique as a part of data analysis - it would be a lot easier to add a PI
and give the instance to a processer than to remap the current
attributes into the xml:id namespace.


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein