[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "Ray Miller" <millerr@centechgroup.com> was heard to say:
|>> I'm not completely sure I understand. Could you post a short test
| document that demonstrates the problem? <<
|
| The Xpointer positioning issue is not a limitation imposed by Docbook-rng
| but tools that only support dtd-based ids. An example of this is Xerces for
| parsing XML documents and for providing XInclude / XPointer support. "...
| XPointer support in Xerces is limited, IDs are supported only when they are
| defined in DTDs ..." ( per George at oXygen ).

Hmm. The xml:id Recommendation is supposed to fix this.

| Xerces appears to successfully resolve Docbook-rng Xpointers by utilizing a
| position syntax of something like xpointer="element(/1/2/3)" to reference a
| nested element but not dereferencing the same nested element utilizing an id
| with syntax such as xpointer="element(foo)", which is (my) preferred method
| for Docbook-dtd-4X

Indeed. The shortcut xpointer="#foo" ought to work too, though there
are still some spec gaps technically.

Hopefully, Xerces will support xml:id "real soon now". A bug report to
them to that effect might be useful.

In the meantime, https://xmlidfilter.dev.java.net/ is supposed to fix
this at the SAX level, so the xml:id attributes "look like" they've
been DTD validated. That might help.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | A child becomes an adult when he
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | realizes he has a right not only
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | to be right but also to be
                                   | wrong.--Thomas Szasz

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