RE: Comments on new draft of 3023bis (fragments, xpointer)

Just a couple thoughts in return embedded below
in an excerpt of your email. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Duerst [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Thursday, 24 February, 2005 18:11
> To: Paul Grosso; Henry S. Thompson; [email protected]; 
> MURATA Makoto
> Cc: Philippe Le Hegaret
> Subject: RE: Comments on new draft of 3023bis (fragments, xpointer)
> 
> I have read the relevant part of the new draft, and I have
> to say that I have to agree with Henry on this point.
> 
> First, I think that the sentence:
> 
> "In particular, the xpointer scheme MUST NOT be specified
> since it is still at the W3C working draft stage."
> 
> is rather inappropriate. There is nothing special to the
> xpointer scheme here; there may be many other schemes that
> are still at a draft stage at one point or another.

I can agree with that.  I think the xpointer scheme was
originally called out because of the confusion between
"XPointer" (Framework) which is a Rec and the "xpointer
scheme" which was what some folks thought xpointer was
going to be but which has basically been abandoned.
But at this point, I agree there is no strong reason
to mention it explicitly.

> 
> I think there are still at least two ways we could define
> things to work:
> 
> a) Other XPointer schemes are allowed but SHOULD/MUST be ignored.

Saying other xpointer schemes are allowed but MUST be ignored
would be fine with me.  

> 
>  >I want a relatively
>  >simple fragment identifier for XML, and I don't really
>  >want it to keep growing.  We're talking about something
>  >that needs to be processed every time someone clicks on
>  >a URI that references an XML resource, and we don't need
>  >complexity here.
> 
> Agreed. But if the sender says "I want you to get exactly
> here, and if that doesn't work, I don't care if you only
> get the document overall", that's just fine, isn't it?

No, you're thinking about browsers "going" somewhere.

That's not the important case.  XML isn't primarily
about display, it's about information.  Xpointers
define a subresource that gets used in some fashion,
not just displayed.  It can make a big difference if
someone is using an xpointer to indicate what part of
an XML resource to use as an XSLT stylesheet or to
XInclude into a document and instead the entire XML
resource is used.

That's why I think it is important to say that the
fragment identifier syntax for the XML type is just
the XPointer Framework and Element() scheme, and
nothing else--all other schemes must be ignored.  

I don't want a lot of flexibility and extensibility 
here.  If someone wants extensibility, let them define 
another MIME type.

paul