xmlhack: Is XPointer too big?

In a minority opinion, Eve Maler and Paul Grosso suggest that "that XPointer would benefit from offering the option of a much more modest feature set."

Maler and Grosso propose something much smaller than the complete XPointer proposal, "along the lines of our FIXptr proposal (W3C member only), that accords with the deployment and implementation patterns seen to date."

FIXptr has apparently seen independent implementation, at much lower cost than full XPointer implementation:

"It may be worth noting that several of the vendors involved in XPointer's development who are likeliest to be in a position to deploy it have no concrete plans to do so. Also, although no speed-of-implementation goal was ever set forth by the WG, we note that the single known complete implementation of XPointer took about two weeks, and the four known experimental implementations of the FIXptr proposal each took about half a day. Surely it is significant that getting four implementors to try the proposal on a casual basis was so easy, compared to the process of uncovering full XPointer implementations. And it appears that no users of the partial XPointer implementations today would lose any functionality if they were limited to FIXptr."

One comment may be a warning regarding W3C development in general:

"The trend towards larger specifications is not merely inconvenient for developers; it can hamper implementation attempts, harm interoperability, and dampen enthusiasm for W3C's work by users and developers alike."