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RE: XML related issues in metalink, was: Last Call: draft-bryan-metalink (The Metalink Download Description Format) to Proposed Standard

2009-12-13 18:48:15
I'm not sure I understand the whitespace treatment.

One example has:

  <url location="de" priority="1">
     ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext
  </url>  
...

"All leading and trailing whitespace is part of the element content,
and MUST be ignored. Consequently, it is disallowed for elements
where
the defined type does not allow whitespace, such as dates, integers,
or IRIs."

Um, that should be "MUST NOT be ignored", right?

Fixed.

Why is whitespace so important?  The alternative to constraining use as you 
have done, which requires that you also "fix" all the examples, is to use the 
type that fits better with user expectations: token.

In the *value space* for the token type, the above example is simply 
"ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext";, with leading and trailing whitespace 
stripped.

Then you can remove the following note:
   Note that there MUST NOT be any white space in a Date construct or in
   any IRI.  Some XML-generating implementations erroneously insert
   white space around values by default, and such implementations will
   generate invalid Metalink Documents.

... and with it, avoid all the errors that inevitably occur when you make 
whitespace significant.  Unless you believe that Metalink documents will never 
be authored by anything other than software.

In looking into this, I noted this:
   # Unconstrained; it's not entirely clear how IRI fit into
   # xsd:anyURI so let's not try to constrain it here

I wonder why you haven't taken the plunge on xsd:anyURI, even if xsd:anyURI has 
dubious official status with regards to IRIs.  In practice, IRIs are commonly 
placed in xsd:anyURI.  The lexical space accommodates them, no implementation 
I'm aware of prevents use of IRIs.

--Martin
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