Subject: [Simple] XCAP Issue 6 Interim Summary: selecting elements by text value

From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 02:42:27 -0400

The issue here was whether or not to include a feature in xcap that 
allowed you to select an element by the value of its content. For 
example, if the doc is this:

<foo>
   <bar>val</bar>
   <bar>ue</bar>
</foo>

then you could do foo/bar[.="val"] and this would select the first bar 
element.

The problem, raised by Joel on the list and discussed at the meeting, is 
that this makes sense only if the text content is actually a useful 
index. In some application usages, the text content may be text for 
human consumption, like a paragraph of text (think about the <t> element 
in xml2rfc). Indexing this is expensive and a waste of time.

I proposed three possible solutions:

1. add more complexity to the spec - allow applicaiton usages to 
declare, in their definitions, when text content represents an index. An 
implementation would therefore be able to be dynamically programmed to 
know which element content to index.

2. Allow selection of elements based on content; assume that URIs would 
not use content as a selector unless it really was a useful index

3. do not allow selection based on content

The question was raised as to whether there was a specific application 
usage driving this feature. There isn't. There was general agreement to 
only add stuff if a concrete need in an existing application usage was 
driving it. Since it was not the case here, there was consensus to drop 
this feature.

Any objections?

Thanks,
Jonathan R.
-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                600 Lanidex Plaza
Chief Technology Officer                    Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
dynamicsoft
[email-masked]                     FAX:   (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net                      PHONE: (973) 952-5000
http://www.dynamicsoft.com

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