Re: [xml-dev] ID/IDREF is evil

[Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Arjun Ray <arjun.ray@verizon.net> wrote:

| Because idref is only defined relative to its enclosing document,
| this means that it's remarkably difficult to create a reference
| to remote entities, meaning that any NIEM document effectively
| has to contain the entire serialization of all of its objects.

I'm not sure I follow this.  IDREF is far from a general purpose
reference mechanism.  It's for intra-document cross-referencing only.
(See the FPML specs for reasonable use.)

Too much water has flowed under too many bridges to bring up the
dreaded H-word again, so I'll let it go at that.

Arjun,

That was in fact the point that I'm trying to make. There was a decision made, early on in the evolution of NIEM, that s:id and s:ref constructors were defined as xs:ID and xs:IDREF respectively. I felt that this was a profound mistake, because it takes what is at heart a construct proxy for a real world object and assigns it what is, intrinsically, a local rather than global identifier.

Kurt Cagle
Invited Expert, XForms Working Group, W3C

Managing Editor, XMLToday.org

kurt.cagle@gmail.com

443-837-8725