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See comments from at Daniel Glazman and Werner Donne at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-i18n-its/2006AprJun/0097.html: [[Daniel Glazman (invited expert in the CSS working group): "Why don't you use IDs for elements (and keys for attributes), instead of the - computationally expensive - XPath?" My reply was: It would be good to do that, but you can do it only if you have control over the whole data in the localization workflow. I heard a similar comment from Iris Orris (Microsoft) at the Unicode conference, but it seems to me this scenario works only for data inside big corporates. - Werner Donne gave a talk on "Managing Multilingual Legislation With XML", see http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/detail/17 . In his approach, he added "metadata" about versioning into XML documents. The meta data was used for alignment of EC documents. Werner said the ITS approach of global rules seems promising for such versioning, since it has no or limited impact on the document(s). One potential issue he saw (again, see Daniel above) was the computational cost of XPath for large documents.]]
Added Werner to the CC list.
Action: working group to discuss and reply.
Action: working group to discuss.
Proposed answer: ITS does not use directly ID-based mechansim because it tries to cover more general cases: not all XML format use IDs. ID-only is also quite limitative if one need to use conditions (e.g translate element X if its parent has an attribute Y with a value Z. XPath 1.0 and later provides ID function that can be used to work with IDs if needed (See an example in the comment #1 of the issue #3463: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=3463#c1) The cost of using XPath is obviously an aspect we had in mind. But from the test implementation we have and from the functionality we tried, the benefits of using XPath seem to outweighs its drawbacks.
Closed.
Summary: The Working Group decided to decline the change.
Hi, The resolution of the Working Group is fine for me. Regards, Werner.