Re: [xml-dev] So maybe ID isn't a problem after all.

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> My point here is that the linking is scoped to <a> tags, which disambiguate 
> the context sufficiently that ID-ness isn't needed, except perhaps for 
> validation.
Not even validation, name is CDATA not ID in HTML.

(That's ID in the XML/SGML sense, but the i-word still keeps coming up
as what really we are talking about is fragment identifiers in uri
references) 

> If it's not HTML, who cares?

You might care if it's pdf and you are using acrobat or equivalently you
are using your standard browser and it hands the file over to acrobat as
it's application/pdf. If the fragment identifier is #foo acrobat will
understand, if it is #xpointer(//*[@id='foo]) then it won't.

The point is that by using a "plain" URI fragment identifier you can
publish a uri reference that works whatever mime type is published from
the uri. Thus there are advantages in making this plain syntax work
for as large a range of documents as possible. In most mime types that
have support for fragment identifiers at all, this syntax iss either the
only or most widely used syntax. But for XML the situation is reversed
and the plain fragment identier can only be reliably used with documents
that declare ids in the internal subset. The idea of the discussion
surely is to see whether there is a way to extend the range of documents
for which these fragment identifiers may be used.

David

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