Subject: [Lager] Schema review, small syntax tweak for reference id's suggested

From: Asmus Freytag <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2015 20:30:56 -0800

All,

I'm in the process of reviewing the schema against the spec and found a 
few minor inconsistencies that are easy to resolve so the schema matches 
the spec - the majority affect only the comments anyway.

However, in the process I came across one issue:

The specification leaves the value for the "id" attribute on a 
"reference" element undefined in section 3.3.8, and the schema uses "text".

However, when we decorate "char" and other elements with a list of 
references in a "ref" attribute we rely on space separation for listing 
multiple values inside a single "ref" attribute (section 4.4.1). Having 
"text" in the schema is clearly too permissive.

I think we should tighten both spec and schema to some useful pattern 
that matches what people tend to use for such ids.
Currently, I have seen numbers (integers), short upper-case strings, and 
perhaps a hyphen. As these potentially occur on every single element in 
a large repertoire (e.g. Chinese), the common use case would favor 
really short patterns.

I think a very restricted pattern like [-_:.\dA-Z]+ is fine. That's the 
pattern that I currently support in my tool. I've thrown colon and 
period in as well, in case anybody absolutely needs to structure their 
references hierarchically.

These "id" values are essentially not much more than footnote markers, 
and I see no overriding need to allow them to contain full words. 
However, a NMTOKEN would fulfill the formal requirement of excluding 
space, at the risk of giving people too much rope to hang themselves with.

Any comments?

A./

---

From: "Marc Blanchet" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Dec 2015 09:13:56 -0500

On 4 Dec 2015, at 23:30, Asmus Freytag wrote:

> All,
>
> I'm in the process of reviewing the schema against the spec and found 
> a few minor inconsistencies that are easy to resolve so the schema 
> matches the spec - the majority affect only the comments anyway.
>
> references in a "ref" attribute we rely on space separation for 
> listing multiple values inside a single "ref" attribute (section 
> 4.4.1). Having "text" in the schema is clearly too permissive.
>
> Currently, I have seen numbers (integers), short upper-case strings, 
> and perhaps a hyphen. As these potentially occur on every single 
> element in a large repertoire (e.g. Chinese), the common use case 
> would favor really short patterns.
>
> I think a very restricted pattern like [-_:.\dA-Z]+ is fine. That's 
> the pattern that I currently support in my tool. I've thrown colon and 

make sense to me. More restrictive makes implementations more robust. 
And I don’t see much of drawbacks in your suggestions.

Marc

>
> A./
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