[whatwg] [WF2] Web Forms 2.0: Repetition and type ID

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Robin Berjon wrote:
> > [things that it is likely schema systems can't check:]
> >  * checking the MIME type of the file
> >  * there must not be more than one <dfn> per term
> >  * some of the more exotic content models, e.g. <ins>, <del>, the
> > distinction between inline-level containers and block-level containers
> >  * checking conformance of <meta> elements (requires parsing a profile)
> > 
> > ...and of course:
> > 
> >  * IDs may contain any characters, not just those allowed in XML IDs.
> 
> Amongst the tools that have been mentionned was Schematron. Out of the 
> box Schematron can't check a media type, but with a very trivial to 
> write extension function it could. All the rest that you mention seems 
> very much doable. Schematron is built on XPath, which is a very useful 
> and powerful little language.

Cool. In that case I look forward to a Schematron HTML5 conformance 
checker.

Just out of interest, how would you do the second one above? Making sure 
that in any one document, there is only one <dfn> for each term defined? 

The relevant part of the spec being:

| Defining term: If the dfn element has a title attribute, then the exact 
| value of that attribute is the term being defined. Otherwise, if it 
| contains exactly one element child node and no child text nodes, and 
| that child element is an abbr element with a title attribute, then the 
| exact value of that attribute is the term being defined. Otherwise, it 
| is the exact textContent of the dfn element that gives the term being 
| defined. [...]
| 
| There must only be one dfn element per document for each term defined 
| (i.e. there must not be any duplicate terms). 

It's simple to implement that in, e.g., a dedicated perl-based conformance 
checker, but I have no idea how you'd do that in Schematron.


> > > Generic XML editors like XXE have support for using a schema to 
> > > guide the editing process, but have no knowledge specific to a given 
> > > language like XHTML. These tools, and other generic XML tools, will 
> > > not be able to recognize the IDness of the 'id' attribute if it's 
> > > not possible to express this in a schema.
> > 
> > As mentioned, that will be the least of their problems.
> 
> No, fantasai is right, I can see this being a FAQ, for no obvious 
> technical reason.

You seriously think that nested templates will be common enough for this 
to be a FAQ? Wow. A few months ago people were saying that this would be 
so rarely used that we should take it out!


> > I didn't want to use ":" at all because of the way that character has 
> > special meaning for namespaces these days.)
> 
> "These days" being six years by now, striving and succesful, I think we 
> just have to live with it :)

Oh I have nothing against it, I was just explaining why I didn't use ":".

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'