Re: Validating IDREFS...

Chris Maden (crism@oreilly.com)
Tue, 1 Sep 1998 11:18:28 -0400 (EDT)

[Michael Kay]
> >The whole point of ID and IDREF is to have a simple intra-document
> >link, so that documents that have non-hierarchical natural
> >structures can be fitted into SGML/XML hierarchies
>
> Indeed so. And the real difficulty with them is not the
> inconvenience to parser writers, but the fact that they are
> incompatible with XPointer.

That's not true. XPointer doesn't explicitly provide support for
IDREFs, but it doesn't need to, since they are built in to XML
itself. And it's not clear what you meant by "they", but IDs are at
the heart of robust use of XPointer.

The first XSL draft provides a way, using the link and
link-end-locator formatting objects, to turn IDREFs into links using
XPointers.

-Chris

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