Internal subset equivalent in new schema proposals?

[roddey at us.ibm.com]

"IMHO the purpose of ID/IDREF is to express non-hierarchical data using
hierarchical notation.  Appropriate use of ID and IDREF attributes
allows the representation of any directed graph, whether acyclic or
cyclic."

How can you represent a strictly acyclic graph using ID/IDREF? For
instance, if you have an employee list, and every employee has an ID
attribute which is his/her employee number and an IDREF attribute which
refers to his/her manager, what do you do when you reach Le Gran Fromage
(sp?)? This person has no manager, but the parser will consider it an error
if his/her manager field does not refer to someone else's employee id. Does
not that not imply the insertion of at least a single bogus cycle in the
data just to make the parser happy? Would an application processing this
file otherwise have to try to gleen that the error occured because of this
known problem and not because of some other, real, problem?

Not trying to be accusatory or anything. I just wonder how that is supposed
to work.



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