XML related issues in metalink, was: Last Call: draft-bryan-metalink (The Metalink Download Description Format) to Proposed Standard

Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> Sun, 13 December 2009 10:16 UTC

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Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:09:29 +0100
From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
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Subject: XML related issues in metalink, was: Last Call: draft-bryan-metalink (The Metalink Download Description Format) to Proposed Standard
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The IESG wrote:
> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider 
> the following document:
> 
> - 'The Metalink Download Description Format '
>    <draft-bryan-metalink-24.txt> as a Proposed Standard
> ...

Hi,

I did a quick check on a few XML related issues, and found:

1) References to W3C specs

- the references currently use many different formats (for 
seriesName/value), it would be great if those were consistent (I 
recommend to use the format used for "REC-xml" for compactness)

- the up-to-date check yielded:

REC-xml-20060816: [FirstEdition] obsoleted by REC-xml-20081126
REC-xml-infoset-20040204: [REC] ok
REC-xml-names-20060816: [FirstEdition] obsoleted by REC-xml-names-20091208
REC-xmlbase-20010627: [FirstEdition] obsoleted by REC-xmlbase-20090128
REC-xmldsig-core-20080610: [REC] ok

(where the out-of-date xml-names reference is excused :-).

2) RNC

- was there an automated check that the collected RNC and the fragments 
are in sync? For "metalinkFile" I see a difference in ordering which may 
indicate that this didn't always happen (the difference appears to be 
irrelevant, but who knows...)

- I found the RNC to miss a few characters (commas, closing braces), 
which indicates it may not have been checked recently. I recommend to do 
that, and also to validate the examples in the spec against the RNC.

3) XML vs whitespace

I'm not sure I understand the whitespace treatment.

One example has:

     <url location="de" priority="1">
        ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext
     </url>

while the prose says in Section 3: "Note that there MUST NOT be any 
white space in a Date construct or in any IRI."

I personally would prefer that whitespace is NOT ignorable, but in any 
case this should be stated somewhere more clearly.

(Note I didn't review the spec, I just did a few XML related checks)

Best regards, Julian