Hello Thomas,
It could lead to confusion, but as Atom doesn't define such an
attribute in its own namespace (or on elements in its own namespace)
and as no other extension that I know of do that either, I don't think
it really matters…
You are right Atom does not define such an attribute but I'd be happier
if extensions could follow Atom conventions as well. Atom sets the
atom:id value not as in an attribute of atom:id but as its content. Why
not following the convention in the first place?
Besides the fact there is no other extension to do so as of yet is quite
irrelevant to me. Atom extensions are fairly young and hopefully they'll
be more and more spreaded.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you *are* mistaken…
Having an attribute named "id" doesn't make it an "ID" (in the sense
of a unique identifier throughout the document, such as the ID type in
a DTD of xs:ID in XMLSchema), otherwise:
- you wouldn't have to declare them explicitely in your DTDs and
there wouldn't be a need for an ID (resp. xs:ID) type in DTD (resp.
XMLSchema)
- the validity constraint "One ID Per Element Type"
[http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#one-id-per-el] could never be met as
soon as you'd declare an ID attribute with a name different from "id"
- there wouldn't have been a need for xml:id
[http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-id/]
Again this is a matter of convention in my opinion. When reading an XML
document I don't want to be obliged to think about the actual meaning of
an id attribute. You are indeed right (and thank you for explaining it
to me) in terms of specification but conventions are often as important.
Specially for people like me who are not XML guru.
Thanks for your feedback by the way :)
- Sylvain
