> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Clark [mailto:jjc@jclark.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 5:32 PM
> To: Tim Bray; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Re: determining ID-ness in XML
>
...
> An alternative would be to have an attribute that declares
> the name of the
> attribute that is an ID attribute, say xml:idatt. To make
> this useable,
> xml:idatt would be inherited. In the typical case where all
> elements use
> the same attribute name for an ID, this means that a user has
> only to add
> something like xml:idatt="id" or xml:idatt="rdf:ID" to their
> root element
> and everything works. You would also need to allow
> xml:idatt="" to disable
> inheritance.
>
Or, xml:idatt goes on the element for which you are declaring an ID, i.e., if xml:idatt="bar" shows up on a foo element, then it indicates that "bar" is an id element for foo's (in the appropriate namespace, of course). For the generic case, use a different xml attribute (say xml:genericid).
Matthew