Re: Permit (greedy) conflicting wildcards

On 20 Mar 2007, at 05:53 , Pete Cordell wrote:

> Original Message From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
>
> This seems an eminently sensible justification to me, and I would  
> imagine what many people would expect.  What is the justification  
> for the currently specified set of rules?

Here's one possible motivation:  when you write a
wildcard that matches an element named 'given', the
wildcard matches an element with that name.  If you
didn't want the wildcards in your content model to
match elements in your target namespace, why did you
not write a wildcard that didn't match them?

> To me, I think many people would be surprised that the rules  
> allowed the example instance above to be valid.  When doing  
> language design, "No surprises" seems like a good mantra.

Me, I think I'd be surprised if a wildcard which is
written to match any element at all were to fail to
match some element.  "Say what you mean" is also
a good rule.

--C. M. Sperberg-McQueen