• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: John Cowan <cowan@l...>, ldodds@i...
• Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:46:45 -0700

At 01:13 PM 10/19/99 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>> 1. what are the historic reasons for the current definition of 
>> ID/IDREF/IDREFS attributes?
>
>ID and IDREF(S) allow general directed graphs to be encoded as
>hierarchical documents.

I think the real question was why is there no scoping other than 
document-scope ID/IDREF.  The answer is that we inherited that from
SGML, which was typically applied in more traditional publishing
environments where documents were created, used, and managed as 
units.  

Leastways, I don't recall the ID/IDREF issues getting in the way
back then, but since XML came along, it's been a continual
irritant. -Tim

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