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

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

> At 5:02 PM +0000 11/7/01, Rob Lugt wrote:

... a very concise description of the problem - thanks Rob.

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> Of course! They're out of luck. The document isn't valid. There is
> nothing new here, nor should we make any effort to solve this
> problem. If these folks have chosen to pass around invalid documents
> and not update their DTDs to reflect their actual practice, that's
> their business, not ours.

You seem to have lost track of my point. I don't feel that a solution that forces
an unknown number of people to make an unknown number of changes to an unknown
number of DTDs to cover an unknown set of circumstances is the best solution.
Sorry, but I don't buy the "blame the stupid DTD owner" line when the sand has
been shifted out from under them.

> Let me phrase the question this way: regarding validity and validity
> only, not the semantics of the attribute, is there any objection to
> an xml:id attribute that is not equally true of xml:base? So far I
> can't see one.

I can see one difference and one similarity. The difference? You can normalise
the information contained in xml:base elsewhere in the document without loss, but
you cannot remove the xml:id attributes and know what attributes you were relying
on to contain unique values. The similarity? When I create DTDs, I won't
specifying an xml:base attribute for every element too. Does anyone?


--
Regards,

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