This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
To ease the pain currently imposed by the Unique Particle Attribution constraint, change the rules for interpreting content models to specify that wildcards and elements have different priorities; when an element in the input matches both a wildcard and an element particle in the content model, the element particle wins -- and there is no violation of the UPA constraint. This proposal has been discussed off and on for a long time, but there appears not to be a separately trackable Bugzilla entry for it, so I am adding this one now. Related issues include bug 2867 (negative wildcards), bug 2544 (interaction between wildcards and element-declarations consistent), and possibly others. The WG agreed in principle on the technical solution to be adopted here (namely: yes, declare that competition between an element particle and a wildcard particle is not a violation of UPA) at its ftf meeting of November 2005 in Toronto.
In August, the WG considered a proposal to introduce 'weakened' wildcards by reformulating the Unique Particle Attribution constraint to allow competition between element particles and wildcard particles. Competition between element particles, and between wildcard particles, continues to be a violation of the constraint. The proposal was adopted at the WG's face to face meeting of August 2006, and the changes appear in the working draft published 31 August. This issue should, I believe, have been closed then, but was left open, apparently in an oversight. So I am marking it closed now. Anyone aware of a reason this issue should NOT be closed should reopen it and explain why.