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

["Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>]

> 
> I think we should not add features to a language for which 
> features exist unless we can prove we didn't create the 
> problem to begin with.

I'm sure that someone made a similar argument 1000 years ago.  "The Roman
Numerals are an international standard, and we shouldn't go with these
new-fangled Arabic things unless you can prove that arithemetic is
impossible using the standard."
<grin> 

Seriously, IDs are the ONE THING that you need to define in a DTD that other
specs -- which otherwise simply refer to well-formed XML -- keep stumbling
over.  The DOM does, Xpath/XPointer does, and so on.  I'm as we speak
writing a little "extract data from an HTML form, put it in an XML instance"
app, and stumbled over the "I can get the data from HTML via an ID but cant'
find the XML element to update without searching for it" problem.  Sure I
could define a DTD or schema, but that would be overkill for me and
seriously limit the consumers of my little app.  (It's an "educational"
example, so it's gotta be very, very simple and generic).  xml:id or one of
the other proposals would make this use case much easier to implement and
understand.