Re: [xml-dev] IDs considered harmful or why keys might be better thanIDs...

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

> Why would one need to redeclare an ID in the internal subset which is
> already declared in the external DTD. Its already an ID right?


Isn't that the whole point of this thread?

I can put a document on my server that has a DOCTYPE pointing at (say)
the docbook DTD but that is no use at all for someone else linking into
that document if they are using a parser (as occurs in mozilla for
instance) that doesn't read external entities of the DTD.
In my own world where I control everything I can arrange that whatever
processors I'm using read the dtd if they need to, but out on the web I
have no control. Well I do have control, I can redo the ID declarations
that are in the DTD and put them in the local subset. Currently that is
the only reliable way to make them work. This is massively inconvenient
if you are working with a dtd that has 100's of these beasties.

> Again, my point about using internal declarations of IDs is for documents
> which don't have an external DTD. If you are using an external DTD you can
> always declare a short DTD driver which sucks in docbook+mathml + whatever
> and defines the new IDs your particular application desires

No. That isn't how the web works. I stick up a document and I have no
idea what application is going to be reading it, but I know that that
application might not read the external subset of the dtd 'cause that's
how it is specified in the XML rec.

David

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