xml-dev - Re: Namespaces and DTDs

[james anderson <James.Anderson@mecomnet.de>]

yes; agreement on all points.
mr. harold is not the only one who would have benefitted.

the only aspect of which i can comprehend, is the claim, that, being able to
bind the prefixes over a dtd would have broken the rule that namespaces should
not "change the validity of a given document". which claim is true, but which
i believe to be fundamentally misdirected.

it's an old argument.

Ronald Bourret wrote:
> 
> james anderson wrote:
> 
> > ? which of the "namespace aware" parsers will permit you to parse
> validate a
> > document for which partions of the dtd contain element declarations with
> > ambiguous names - without first modifying the dtd? i've yet to hear a
> solution
> > to the "ambiguous name" problem for xml-1.0/+ns conforming parsers.
> 
> Good point -- it was unfair of me to blame the parsers here.  It all seems
> rather obvious now:
> 
> Q. Why were namespaces invented?
> A. To disambiguate duplicate names.
> 
> Q. I have a DTD with duplicate names.  How do I disambiguate them?
> A. Use namespaces.
> 
> The only inobvious bit is that, because there is no way to declare
> namespaces in the DTD, you can't declare different default namespaces for
> different parts of the DTD, which would have solved Elliotte's problem
> rather neatly.


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