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

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

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At 06:41 1-11-2001, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>What would result from the reverse solution:  a document which
>is subject to a raw XPointer must have a DTD or Schema?

As Daniel noted, that's already the case.  The problem, however, is that 
even if I have a DTD, there is no guarantee that the receiving system is 
going to pay any attention to it, and so I don't know if my XPointers are 
going to work or not.  That's scary.

XML processors are required to acknowledge ID declarations in the internal 
subset[*], but that has been declared infeasible because SOAP (for whatever 
reason) forbids internal subsets.  It's also a maintenance pain since the 
ID-ness of an attribute is really a feature of the document type, and 
properly belongs with the rest of the document type definition, but some 
over-zealous validation systems will issue warnings about the duplicate 
declarations.  (For a while, MSXML would halt because an element type can 
only have one attribute of type ID - never mind that the two attributes had 
the same name, as well.)

I like the PI solution.  It's redundant with the DTD information, doesn't 
change the structure or naming of my documents at all, but can pass 
information on to systems that don't read the DTD without my having to muck 
about with an internal subset.

~Chris

[*] Modulo restrictions on external parameter entities.
- -- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, HMM Consulting Int'l, Inc.
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://www.hmmci.com/ > <URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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