Come to think of it, perhaps the problem is more that we equate an "XML document" to a "web resource". What we perhaps need is a way of distributing a single XML document over a large collection of web resources, and then navigating around that XML document seamlessly, using XPath?

Of course we can do that crudely already, using entities or XInclude. Perhaps we just need a smarter implementation of transclusion, where the document fragments are fetched on demand when XPath navigation needs them, rather than being assembled eagerly by the XML parser.

Michael Kay

Saxonica

On 15 Aug 2013, at 16:11, Uche Ogbuji wrote:

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:39 AM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@y...> wrote:

And perhaps the core of the matter is really the concept of linking, and the way it's presently tied up to URIs. Should we not have a more key-like traversal experience, instead? There might be alternatives based on collections and within-collection keys. (For example, "documents" might be addressed by QNames combining the collection URI and the within-collection key, like "client:c809712".) And I would be glad if you took an active interest in this fundamental problem and perhaps came up with new approaches.

Well this *is* one area in which the Web has led a lot of experimentation, and I would say that the results have not been encouraging.  Attempts to foster additional key-lookup-like resource access (i.e. URI schemes) have gone nowhere (even DOI, as widely used as it is I think only proves that if you try to set up an alternative to HTTP URIs, people will simply re-layer HTTP URIs back on top of that alternative).

I do agree that some sort of abstract index mechanism, shareable across Web resources, would be a Very Good Thing, as you and Michael have variously suggested, but the first step is probably in puzzling out why others failed (the Tag URI scheme seemed promising, but never really worked out).

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