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See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sml/2008Feb/0268.html for details
Sandy responded to this http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sml/2008Feb/0271.html
Henry Thompson has raised the same question in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-schema-ig/2008Mar/0002.html 1) Why sml:ref instead of xlink:href?
Sandy's reply answers a part of the question, namely why sml:ref is necessary (I'm not convinced by his argument, but that's a separate question). He doesn't address the part of the question I care about: why _can't_ I use SML to validate my document collections which use simple xlinks?
In response to #3, one can define a new SML Reference Scheme (http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-sml-20080303/#Reference_Schemes) that recognizes simple xlinks as inter-document references, implement support for this scheme in an SML validator, and use this validator to validate documents that use simple xlinks.
In my opinion, not good enough. The SML spec. itself should define both an XHTML href Reference Scheme and a Simple XLink Reference Scheme. Either it's easy to do this, so you definitely should, or it's hard, in which case that uncovers a weakness in your spec.
Sandy says "You may only need to insert sml:ref="true" attributes to references in your XML data. Even that can be avoided by using a default value (DTD or Schema)." Neither of these works as far as I can see -- if you have a large data set, no edit is acceptable. And since sml:ref is explicitly _not_ tested for against the PSVI, adding a default attr. in my schema does me no good.
Resolution in F2F on 3/31. sml:ref="true" identifies an SML reference and is orthogonal to the SML Reference scheme used to carry the address. Proposal: Rename 'schema validity rules' to 'schema component rules' The SML WG believes that the above proposal resolves this issue fully. I'm changing its status accordingly. The change in status should cause email to be sent to the originator of this issue, to whom the following request is addressed. Please review the changes adopted and let us know if you agree with this resolution of your issue, by adding a comment to the issue record and changing the Status of the issue to Closed. Or, if you do not agree with this resolution, please add a comment explaining why. If you wish to appeal the WG's decision to the Director, then also change the Status of the record to Reopened. If you wish to record your dissent, but do not wish to appeal the decision to the Director, then change the Status of the record to Closed. If we do not hear from you in the next two weeks, we will assume you agree with the WG decision.
resolution (conf call on 4/17/2008): add 'editorial' and remove the 'decided' keyword because the 2 week response period has elapsed (see comment# 7).
The last two comments are, I think, addressed to bug 5525 and not this one!
On 2008-04-04 the XML Schema WG endorsed this comment, with the following added clarification on its behalf: With regard to the xlink:ref part of the comment, the WG does not feel it can endorse. SML should allow sml:ref to be specified by annotating schemas -- ie that SML should allow the use of the PSVI in the task of recognizing SML references. Further, the SML spec should say clearly what base URI is used to absolutize relative references (note that this is a general technical comment, not schema specific).
The WG reviewed Comments 9 and 10 and believes that there may be some confusion here. Henry's original comment raised, in a single paragraph, two distinct technical issues. The issue of XLink support is now being tracked as bug 5561; the issue of schemaless identification of references is now bug 5541. The URI absolutization issue is tracked by Bug 5542. We agree with the XML Schema WG's view that it should be possible to specify sml:ref attributes by adding them, with a default value to the schema. Further details may be found in bug 5541.
This bug was originally about a single issue: why do we need to use sml:ref=true to denote a reference? Comment #7 addressed it fully. That comment has a copy-paste error (a wrong proposal was pasted). To avoid confusion, we have reproduced the correct part of the response from comment# 7 below: sml:ref="true" identifies an SML reference and is orthogonal to the SML Reference scheme used to carry the address. The other issues mentioned in parts of the bug text are being tracked separately as 5541, 5542 and 5561 (see comment# 11). Since the central issue of this bug has been adequately addressed and since we have not received any comment opposing the resolution, we plan to close this bug. Please review the resolution adopted and let us know if you agree with this resolution of your issue, by adding a comment to the issue record and changing the Status of the issue to Closed. Or, if you do not agree with this resolution, please add a comment explaining why. If you wish to appeal the WG's decision to the Director, then also change the Status of the record to Reopened. If you wish to record your dissent, but do not wish to appeal the decision to the Director, then change the Status of the record to Closed. If we do not hear from you in the next two weeks, we will assume you agree with the WG decision.
Per the resolution in 5/29 call
Given the overall architecture, depending literal _or_ implicit sml:ref to signal the _existence_ of an SML reference is reasonable, so I agree that the xlink:href issue can be dealt with separately, and I'm happy for this bug to be closed.