Re: [topicmaps-comment] mergeMap Pointing to MoreThanOnetopicMapElement

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Lars Marius Garshol
| 
| Well, yes and no. It means changing the mechanism by which the arcs
| in a topic map graph are asserted. It's kind of like changing '<' to
| be '[' (and '>' to be ']') in XML.

* W. Eliot Kimber
| 
| I'm not sure I'm following you here--if by "mechanism" you mean the
| attribute that specifies the pointer, 

I do.

| then the only thing that's changing is the attribute name (or rather
| the name space in which the name is placed)--the pointer syntax and
| the semantics of that pointer are unchanged. 

Correct.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| The change is small in one sense, but in another it's clearly not, in
| the sense that if you use an unsupported version of the syntax (with
| some software) the result is total breakage. Nothing will work.
 
* W. Eliot Kimber
|
| Clearly there would be a transitional period during which both forms
| of the attribute would need to be recognized--but I don't think this
| is any different from deprecating a method in an API.

Not that much different, no. 

I would be unhappy with any change at all, though. I think we should
leave XTM 1.0 unchanged for as long as we possibly can, and then sit
down and make a bunch of changes at the same time, producing XTM 1.1
or 2.0. An XTM 1.01 I don't think justifies the cost, political or
technical.
 
| At the moment, XTM is at best underspecified with respect to the
| interpretation of XPointers and the limitations on them, with the
| side effect that, for example, different otherwise conforming
| implementations may have different, equally justifiable, behaviors
| for interpretation of bare ID references when there is no governing
| schema or DTD. 

That's perfectly true, and the new syntax specification can fix this,
without changing the syntax. At the moment, that is what I would
prefer to do.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >