Re: [Saxdotnet-devel] Discussion status

[Elliotte H. <el...@me...>]

Karl Waclawek wrote:


> - Should GetType() potentially differentiate between "NMTOKEN"
>   and and enumeration? Choices: return "ENUMERATION" or the
>   actual list of values.


One more note on this: The XML Infoset spec states:

# [attribute type] An indication of the type declared for this attribute 
in the DTD. Legitimate values are ID, IDREF, IDREFS, ENTITY, ENTITIES, 
NMTOKEN, NMTOKENS, NOTATION, CDATA, and ENUMERATION. If there is no 
declaration for the attribute, this property has no value. If no 
declaration has been read, but the [all declarations processed] property 
of the document information item is false (so there may be an unread 
declaration), then the value of this property is unknown. Applications 
should treat no value and unknown as equivalent to a value of CDATA. The 
value of this property is not affected by the validity of the attribute 
value.

So it does distinguish between ENUMERATION and NMTOKEN.


> Question: What is GetType() actually useful for?


It is important to know which attributes have ID, IDREF, and IDREFS 
types. That has a lot of practical implication for XPath, XPointer, and 
other applications. ENTITY, ENTITIES, and NOTATION are also practically 
important in the rare use cases where someone is using unparsed entities 
and notations.

For serialization it's sometimes useful to know whether an attribute has 
type CDATA or not, to support proper round-tripping. However, the 
distinction between ENUMERATION and NMTOKEN is pretty minimal and 
somewhat tautological. For instance, you need it to make XInclude work, 
because XInclude is defined in terms of the Infoset, but the practical 
impact is pretty small. I can imagine it might be useful if you were 
trying to derive a DTD from an instance document.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  el...@me...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim