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Re: [xml-dev] ID-ness in XML
On Sun, 2001-11-11 at 17:20, Marcus Carr wrote:
>
> "Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
>
> > No, I should have been clearer about that. Documents using existing
> > DTD-style ID attributes would continue to use their IDs. I'd encourage
> > developers creating new specs to use xml:id as it would work with or
> > without DTD processing, but I wouldn't declare xml:id the ONLY way to
> > mark an ID.
>
> If XML was being designed now, I'd agree that the attribute approach is better.
> The problem is that because of the limitation of one ID per element, your
> solution doesn't provide a migration path for existing documents - owners can't
> declare both attributes to allow both the new and old documents to be valid.
The migration path I had in mind is that ID would still work just fine
on the "legacy" documents, provided that they were processed by a
validating parser or a non-validating parser that read the DTD.
That leaves those documents in precisely the same position they hold
now, while letting new vocabularies move forward. If you need to
transition and want both, just mark the old ID value as CDATA and add
xml:id - when you're ready, of course. Redundancy helps a lot in these
kinds of cases, ugly though it may be.
--
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue