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Team Comment on the XIndirect Submission

W3C is pleased to receive the XIndirect submission from ISOGEN International, LLC. XIndirect is a way of representing indirect addresses (pointers). In other words, it is a way to write links in XML where the target of a link is determined from data held in separate part of the document from the actual link itself. Extensive experience in the SGML industry showed that this sort of indirection can be very beneficial, espcially in large-scale document management.

XML already has an indirection facility which could be used in links: internal text entities. Reasons for defining a new facility which does not make use of entities might include:

• Since entities are replaced by their content during XML parsing, they are fragile: they may not survive a cycle of editing a document and then saving it.
• Not all uses of XML support the definition of XML entities; for example, SOAP payloads cannot define them.
• XIndirect is a way to represent the fact of indirection in markup: it is semantic, whereas an approach using entities is syntactic.

Next Steps

The submission will be brought to the attention of the XML community through the xml-dev mailing list, as well as to the W3C Advisory Committee and XML Plenary.

Although the XML Linking Working Group is not chartered at this time, any future W3C Working Groups involved with XML linking may wish to consider this Submission.

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