On Wed, 26 May 1999, Patrice Bonhomme wrote:
 
> We are rewriting this tool to become fully compatible with the XPointer
> and XLink WDs. The main pb is coming from the use of the doc attribute
> (of type ENTITY) within a linkGrp element. There is no mechanism for
> factorizing a target URL to avoid its repetition. Something like this
> would be nice :
>
> <linkGrp xlink:base="http://www/toto/titi-fr.xml#">
> <xptr id="x1" xlink:from="id(d1p1s1)">
> <xptr id="x2" xlink:from="id(d1p1s2)">
> ...
> <link targets="#id(d1p1s1) x1">
> ...
> </linkGrp>
>
> As u can see, we have modified (or extended) the type of the 'targets'
> attribute.
 
And created invalid Xlinks. The current productions are:
 
    Locator ::= URI
         | Connector( Xpointer | Name )
         | URI Connector( Xpointer | Name )
 
    Connector ::= '#' | '|'
 
Since neither Xpointer or Name expand to the empty string, the URI
"http://www/toto/titi-fr.xml#" would presumably cause an error to be
reported by a conformant XLink processing system. You could drop the
final '#', but then you lack the ability to signal your intent that the
containing resource is to be fetched initially as a whole. So, this
would be valid:
 
<linkGrp xlink:base="http://www/toto/titi-fr.xml">
<xptr id="x1" xlink:from="#id(d1p1s1)">
<xptr id="x2" xlink:from="#id(d1p1s2)">
 
Given the semantics of '#' ( = "please get all of the resource, 'cause I
might not be done with it quite yet."), I think that your example makes
more sense.  But them is the productions.
 
In general, of course, you are right: the inability to factorize a URI
will make many TEI constructs difficult to reproduce exactly, since the
ability to split location information across "doc", "to" and "from"
attributes in different elements will be gone.
 
- Gregory Murphy <[log in to unmask]>
   __o   Software Engineer
 _`\<,_  Solaris Software
(*)/ (*) Sun Microsystems