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

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 06:29:24PM -0800, Joe English wrote:
> The only other workable alternative I can think of is to
> modify the XPointer spec -- which AFAICS is the principal
> bit of technology that really needs to identify IDs without
> prior knowledge of the vocabulary -- so that
> 
>     http://somewhere/something#foo
> 
> is interpreted as
> 
>     document("http://somewhere/something")
> 	/ descendants-or-self::*[attval::*[local-name() = 'id'] = 'foo'][1]
> 
> An inelegant solution to be sure.  (Though this is basically
> what I always do anyway when I need to identify IDs, since
> in practice it's more reliable than anything else.)

  This was looked at. And existing DTDs with id attributes not of type
ID seems to exist. This totally break them, and make pointing unreliable
because a lot of tools expects #foo to point to the ID of name foo, and
you could actually end up pointing to a different part of the document
against the author(s) intent. Compatibility with the XPath id() function
was considered really important too.

Daniel

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